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THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



" He who cannot express his thoughts correctly in 
his own language, is not likely to obtain credit for 
much knowledge of any other ; nor will an ill-spelt, 
ungrammatical letter impress anyone with the idea 
that the writer of it is an ' educated ' man ; while, 
on the other hand, the Englishman whose linguistic 
acquirements do not extend beyond the language of 
Shakspeare, but who knows that thoroughly and 
can wield it well, possesses an instrument with which 
he may fight his way to almost any position he may 
choose to aspire to, whether he turn his thoughts to 
poetry or to politics, to literature or to commerce." — 
The Reader, January 28, 1865. 



THE 

DEAN'S ENGLISH 

§, Critfcism m % Iran at Crotarg's tap' 

ON THE 

QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 



G. WASHINGTON MOON, 

FELLOW OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE. 



Jmullj ©M&M. 



ALEXANDER STRAHAN & CO., PUBLISHERS, 
139 GEAND STREET, NEW-YOEK. 



pS - * 






"Literature, if it is to flourish, must have a 
standard of taste built up, which shall expand to 
meet new forms of excellence, but which shall pre- 
serve that which is excellent in old forms, and shall 
serve as a guide to the rejection of whatever is bad, 
pretentious, and artificial ; and it is the business of 
critics to see that this standard is built up and main- 
tained." — Saturday Review. 



gY TR A NSFEg 











PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION. 



I haye been asked not to publish another 
edition of this work ; but I do not think 
I should be benefiting the cause of lite- 
rature by complying with that request. 
" The care of the national language" says 
Schlegel, M is at all tiines a sacred trust. 
u JSvery man of education should make it 
M the object of his unceasing concern to pre- 
"serve his language pure" ; and I consider 
that I am doing only my duty in that 
respect, when I re-issue this work, which, 
by exposing the errors of one of exalted 
position and reputed learning, makes a 



PREFACE. 

"light in the church" serve as^t beacon 
to all around. 

I wish it to be distinctly understood thaf 
in publishing these criticisms I have not 
been actuated by any feeling of ill-will 
towards the Dean of Canterbury. I object 
not to the man, but to the man's language ; 
it is faulty in the extreme ; and since the 
faults of teachers, if suffered to pass un- 
reproved, soon become the teachers of 
faults, it was necessary that some one 
should take upon himself the task of 
"demonstrating", as Q 17ie Edinburgh He- 
l view ' said, " thatiohile the Dean undertook 
" to instruct others, he teas himself but a 
u castaway in matters of grammar ". As 
a fellow of the Royal Society of Litera- 
ture, one of the objects of which is " to 
" preserve the purity of the English lan- 
guage", I took upon myself the demon- 
stration. How far I have succeeded, each 



PREFACE. 

individual reader will determine for him- 
self; but the rapid sale of three editions 
of ' The Dean's English ', and the demand 
for a fourth, give very flattering evidence 
that, by the public generally, the work 
has been favourably received. 

Since the publication of the last edition 
of ' The Dean's English \ the Dean has 
brought out the second edition of ' The 
' Queen's English \ One circumstance, in 
connexion with that, is worthy of remark. 
In 'Good Words' the Dean said to his 
readers, — "The less you turn your words 
" right or left to observe Mr. Moon's rules, 
u the better". It will provoke a smile on 
the face of the reader of these pages to 
be told, that the Dean himself, although 
he gives this advice to others, has altered 
and struck out, altogether not fewer than 
eight-and-twenty passages which I had 
condemned as faulty. For the entertain- 



PREFACE. 

ment of the curious in such matters, I 
have given, in parallel columns in this 
edition, the sentences as originally pub- 
lished in ''Good Words \ and condemned 
in i The Dean's English '/ and the altered 
sentences as they now appear in the 
Dean's second edition of his l Queen's 
'English \ 

The Dean's book contains much valu- 
able information, collected from various 
sources ; but it is blended with so very 
much that would be really injurious to 
the student of literature, that the work 
can never safely be recommended for his 
guidance. The style, too, in which it is 
written, is so hopelessly bad, that no 
amount of alteration could obtain for it 
the praise of being a model for chasteness 
and elegance of expression. We still read 
in it, of persons making " a precious mess" . 
of their work ! and expletives, we are 



PREFACE. 

informed, serve to "grease the wheels of 
"talk"/ Improvements, it is true, have 
been made in some of the paragraphs ; a 
man is no longer spoken of by the slang 
phrase "an individual" ; but the Dean is 
so strangely forgetful of the courtesy due 
to women, that he uses, respecting them, 
the most debasing of all slang phrases. 
He speaks of " some of the European 
" rulers "y [there are but two to whom the 
Dean's words can refer ; — our own Sovq-* 
reign Lady, and the Queen of Spain ;] and 
he describes these by an epithet which is 
equally applicable to dogs ! — they are 
"females" ! 

Surely, after this, it will be only modest 
of the Dean to retire from the office of 
lecturer on the Queen's English; and, if 
his good sense has not utterly left him, 
he will wisely reflect on the folly of at- 
tracting attention to a style of writing 



PREFACE. 

"which", as Junius said of the character 
of Sir William Draper, "'mill only pass 
" without censure when it passes without 
"observation". 

London, March, 1865. 



PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. 



The issue of a second edition of these 
letters afforded me an opportunity for 
noticing certain explanations of my oppo- 
nent, the Dean of Canterbury, and for 
extending my criticisms to his ; Plea for 
c the Queerts English, No. Ill \ 

I resumed the subject in perfect con- 
fidence that he, who in the recent edition 
of his essays on the Queen's English had 
honoured me with his expressions of 
friendship, and had thought it quite con- 
sistent with friendship that he should 
combat my objections, and maintain and 



PREFACE. 

defend his own opinions, would not refuse 
me a right which he claimed for him- 
self. 

I did not extend my criticisms to his 
recently published volume 4 TJie Queen's 
*- English? / but, taking up the subject where 
I had left off, I continued my strictures 
on the essays as they originally appeared 
in ' Good Words \ 

The reader is doubtless aware that, " in 
"a considerably altered form", the said 
essays were subsequently "presented to 
"the public". In that volume some of 
the passages which I had criticised 
were defended; others were, very pru- 
dently, omitted; and many more were 
" considerably altered " ; but sentences 
" altered " by my opponent are not always 
improved. The following one has gone 
through the process ; — " I used the word 
"in an unusual sense, but at the same 



PREFACE. 

"time one fully sanctioned by usage" 
This needs no comment. The Dean 
changed the structure of that passage 
also, where, between the pronoun " it " 
and the noun " habit " to which it refers, 
eight-and-twenty substantives intervene. 
6i But", it has been remarked, " in alter- 
" ing this passage he opened his armour 
"in such a way as to give the critic a 
" most tempting opportunity for inflicting 
" another gash on his somewhat careless 
" opponent." In e Good Words ' the Dean 
wrote, — " You perhaps have heard of the 
" barber who, while operating on a gentle- 
" man, expressed his opinion, that, after all, 
"the cholera was in the hair." As "altered", 
the sentence runs thus, — "We remember in 
" Punch the barber who, while operating", 
&c. This, of course, suggests the idea 
that Punch, besides being a wit, and a 
satirist, is also a barber, and that he not 



PREFACE. 
only operates upon human consciences but 
also upon human chins ! The Dean will 
very likely put in his irresistible plea, — 
" We do not write for idiots" ; but, seeing 
he is always trying to make us believe 
that the style he advocates is one pre- 
eminent for its direct and simple clearness, 
he should so write that it would be almost 
impossible to misunderstand him. Had 
he made but the most trifling alteration 
in his sentence, no other meaning, than 
that which he wished to express, would 
have been suggested. Why, for example, 
did he not write, — u We remember read- 
" ing in Punch, of the barber who," &c. ? 
This would have been much more per- 
spicuous. 

The Dean thought it advisable to 
change the name also of his work. It was 
no longer ' A Plea for the Queen's English ', 
but c The Queen's English \ This alter- 



PREFACE. 

ation compelled me to give up the 
title under which the first of these letters 
appeared, namely, ' A Defence of the 
' Queen's Miglish '/ lest, by still retaining 
that title, it should seem, to those persons 
who are unacquainted with the controversy, 
to imply that I had actually written a 
defence of my opponent's book — a defence 
of ' The Queen's English ' / 

It is with sincere pleasure that I record 
my acceptance of Dr. Alford's explanation 
respecting the objectionable epithets con- 
tained in his reply to my first letter, — 
they were not intended for me, but for 
some hypothetical person. — I request the 
reader will receive my remarks on the 
said epithets as intended for some hy- 
pothetical Dean. 

Since those remarks were published I 
have had the honour of becoming person- 
ally acquainted with my opponent ; and 



xvi PREFACE. 

those who enjoy the privilege of his society 
will have no difficulty in believing, that 
I sincerely respect him as a man, al- 
though I cannot think very highly of 
him as an English scholar. 

London, October, 1864. 



CONTENTS. 



ADJECTIVES. 

PAGE 

" A decided weak point", or "A decidedly 

weak point " 53 

"Not a strict neuter-substantive," or " Not 

strictly a neuter-substantive " . 56, 132 
" Speak no coarser than usual", or " Speak. 

not more coarsely than usual " . 55,92 

"The words nearest connected", or "The 

words most nearly connected " . . 55 
The rule respecting "first and lasV and 

"former and latter " . . . .150 

ADVERBS. 

Dr. Blair on adverbs . . . .15 

"Hath the Lord only spoken by Moses?" 

or " Hath the Lord sjDoken only by 

Moses?" . . . . . .81 

" His own use so frequently of it ", or " His 

own so frequent use of it ". . . 96 
" How nicely she looks ", or " How nice she 

looks" 95 

" It appears still more plainly ", or "It 

appears still more plain " . . . 95 
" I only bring forward some things ", or " I 

bring forward some things only" 14, 127 
" They may be correctly classified ", or " They 

may correctly be classified " . . 113,138 
"We merely speak of numbers", or "We 

speak of numbers merely " . . . 14 

b 2 



CONTENTS. 

AMBIGUITY. 

PAGE 

Dr. Campbell on constructive ambiguity . 23 
Lord Karnes on constructive ambiguity . 10 
A back-wood planted with thoughts . . 61 
A cow that tossed about a street . . 19 
A man losing his mother in the papers 18, 127 
A paragraph of less than ten lines, yet so am- 
biguously worded that it admits of 10,240 
different readings . . . 68, 135 
A strange sentence from Dean Swift's writings 18 
A witness " intoxicated by the motion of an 

honourable member " . . .18 
"Compositors without any mercy " . . 12 
"Compositors without the slightest compunc- 
tion" 11,126 

Expressing asentence,orexpressingthe mean- 
ing 64 

Expressing a woman .... 64 

Human kidneys in dogs . . . .35 

Intellectual qualities of raiment . . 36 

Incongruous association of ideas 18, 67, 127 

" I will introduce the body of — my essay " 13, 127 
Obscure writing ..... 103 

Professors walking off with dictionaries 60, 134 
" Sometimes the editors fall, from their ig- 
norance" ...... 9 

" The beaux painted their faces, as well as 

the women " 19 

" The Greeks wheeled about and halted, with 

the river on their backs " , . . 21 
" The one rule of all others " . . 54, 131 

CONJUNCTIONS. 

Does "than" govern an accusative case? 94,146,167 
" As well as ", and " So well as " . . 98 
" This [as well as that] fix it " . . 116,139 
" Try and think" 168 



CONTENTS. 
CRITICISM. 

PAGE 

An extract from ''The Saturday Review'* . 176 
ELLIPSIS. 

Brevity should be subordinate to perspicuity 108 

" Quack, Quack ?" " Bow, wow"! . . 109 

Unallowable ellipsis 28 

" We call a cup-board a cubbard, and so of 

many other compound words " . 58, 133 

EMPHASIS. 

The use of emphasis .... 26 

The misuse of emphasis — l 'And they did eat " 28 

EXPLETIVES. 

" At all" 110 

NOUNS. 

Relatives without any nouns to which they 

refer 35 

Singular or plural . . . . .163 
"The press" — a collective noun . . 163 

OBSCURITY. [See Ambiguity]. 
PERSPICUITY. 

What is perspicuity ? . . . .23 

The most essential quality in all writings . 26 
[See also Ambiguity]. 

PREPOSITIONS. 

" Different to ", or " Different from " . .53 
Errors in the use of the preposition "from" 10, 96 
u In respect of", or " With respect to " . 64 
Not " five outs and one in ", but five ins and 

one out 118 

" The cat jumped on [to] the chair " . .44 
" Treating an exception", or " Treating o/an 

exception" .... 65, 108 



CONTENTS. 
PRONOUNS. 

PAGE 

Dr. Campbell on pronouns . . . .33 
A difficulty of him ... .62 

A paragraph with twenty-eight nouns inter- 
vening between the pronoun and its 

noun 36, 68, 131 

" As tall as him ", " As tall as me " . . 14-8 
u It is /", or " It is me . 53, 143, 156, 158 

Misuse of pronouns ..... 84 
"More than 1 ", or " More than me " 94, 146, 147 
" Such as me", or " Such as /" . . 158 
" Than who ", or " Than whom " . 147, 168 
The management of pronouns is the test of a 

scholar's mastery over the language . 32 
The possessive pronoun " its " occurs only 

once in the Bible . . . 37, 131 
The date of the introduction of u ife" into 

the Bible 78, 137 

" The nations not so blest as thee " . . 148 
The relation between nouns and pronouns, the 

great stumbling-block to most writers . 35 

"This" and "that" 170 

"Thou" and "thee", when used . 6, 126 

William Cobbett on "it" .... 36 
"Which I do" ..'... 169 

PRONUNCIATION. 

The pronunciation of Greek proper names 30, 74, 130 
Should the "A" in "humble'''' be aspirated? 

30, 150, 160 
PUNCTUATION. 

An error in the sense occasioned by the inser- 
tion of a comma . . . . .112 

An error in the sense occasioned by the mis- 

placing of a comma . . . .115 

An error in the sense occasioned by the omis- 
sion of a comma . . .11, 21, 106, 126 



CONTENTS. 

SENTENCES. 

PAGE 

Dr. Blair on toe construction of sentences . 1 7 

Dr. Campbell on the construction of sentences 17 

Lord Karnes on the construction of sentences 17 

Other authorities on the construction of sen- 
tences 18 

"Constructing" a sentence and "construing" 

a sentence 67 

Examples of the violation of the law respect- 
ing the position of words in a sentence 

IS, 19, 20, 128, 134 

Objectionable construction of sentences . 65 

" Squinting construction " . . . 21, 112 

The natural order of constructing a sentence 66 
SLANG. 

"A female" . 

u An individual " 

" A party " 

M A tipple " . 

"A trap" 

" Come to grief" 
SPELLING. 

" Honor ", or "Honour " 

"Odor", or "Odour" 

"Tenor", or " Tenour " 

TAUTOLOGY AND TAUTOPHOXY. 

" Abated the nuisance by enacting that the 

debatable syllable ", &c. . . 118, 130 
"Account for specimens, for which the author 

must not be accounted responsible " . 118 
" A counter-roll or check on the accounts. 
From this account of the word it ap- 
pears ", &c 118 

Five ins and one out . . . .118 
Three ins following each, other, — " in in in M 20 
Other, otner, others 118 





. 114,138 




65, 135 




. 172 




. 1*72 




. 172 




28, 129, 171 


ur" . 


46, 90 


5) 


. 90 


ur " . 


. 49 



CONTENTS. 
VERBS. 

PAGE 

" He flew upon me," and " He fell upon me" 170 
" I ain't certain ", " I ain't going " . . 107 
" I need not have troubled myself" . . 59 

" Stick no bills" 174 

" The next point which I notice shall be", &c. 62 
" There are three first and [there are] one 

last" 57,132 

The verb " to leave " .... 148 

The verb " to progress " . . . .62 
" To the former belong three, to the latter 

[belong] one" . . . . 57, 132 
" Twice one is two " or " twice one are two " 163 
" Would have been broken to pieces or [would 

have been] come to grief" 28, 129, 171 

MISCELLANEOUS. 

The power of example .... 3 
Dr. Campbell on the formation of languages 4 
The office of the grammarian and of the critic 5 
The influence of popular writers . . 7 

Throwing stones 8 

Persuasive teaching 8 

Mending their ways — " highways ", " by- 

roads", and" private-roads" . 12,126 
Great things which hang up framed at railway 

stations 20, 128 

" Individuals in social intercourse " . 20, 129 
The source of mistakes . . . 29, 130 

Odious and odorous 31 

Be courteous ...... 39 

u We do not write for idiots " ... 41 
"A most abnormal elongation of the auricular 

appendages" . . . . 42,84 

Call a spade, a spade . . . .42 

Falling up into a depth . . . .42 



CONTEXTS. 



"Xo case, abuse the plaintiff" ... 43 
Open up 50 

Alanguagethatgrew2^by being broughtcfozfTi 51 
Xeglect of the study of English at our public 

schools 53 

11 An individual occurring in Shakspeare " 65, 135 
A fact " stated into prominence " . . 66 

Dean's English 6S 

A literary curiosity . . . . 71, 135 
The play of Hamlet with the Ghost left out 7 1 
Misquotation of an opponent's words . 73 

Misrepresentations 74 

"Seeing " is not always " believing " . 80, 136 
Misquotation of Scripture ... 81, 137 
" Why do you call me an ass ?•' . . . 84 
A letter to the Editor of c The Patriot ' . 86 
Explanation respecting the charge of dis- 
courtesy 86 

Withdrawal of the charge of discourtesy . 89 
A teacher is always amenable to criticism . 90 
What is a nucleus ? ..... 91 
" Right to a t " , . - . . . , 94 
The importance of trifles .... 98 
A groundless fear ..... 99 
John Milton on rules and maxims . .100 
An anecdote of Douglas Jerrold . . 103 
1 The Edinburgh Review ' on ' Sordello ' . 104 
Educated persons ..... 107 
Irishisms, — "and the like" . . .111 
" Thefoial'xi 1 intenour"and " the final ' s' 

in months " 116 

Variety not always charming . . .117 
Xo special training in English at our Colleges 119 
The English language compared to a temple 122 
The injurious effects of Dean Alford's essays 141 
Hypercriticism . . . . . .151 

Irresistible progress of language . . 162 



CONTENTS. 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 





PAGE 


The Edinburgh Review " . 


XXV 


The Westminster Review " 


XXV 


The Dublin Review " 


XXF1 


Tlie London Review ' 


xxv i 


The London Quarterly Review ' 


xxvii 


7%e British and Foreign Evangelical Reviei 


o ' xxvii 


The Weekly Review " 


. xxviii 


57ie Social Science Review ' 


xxviii 


J7?e Journal of Sacred Literature ' . 


xxix 


The Phonetic Jour noV 


XXX 


The Record" , . . 


. xxxiv 


27i<? Churchman* 1 .... 


XXXV 


77ie Church Review " . 


xxxvi 


27ie Church Standard" . ... 


xxxvi 


jTfte Christian Observer" . 


. xxxvii 


TAe Christian News ' 


. xxxvii 


The London Christian Times ' . 


xxxviii 


27ze Nonconformist ' 


xxxix 


The Patriot" . 


xl 


Tlie English Journal of Education " . 


xli 


jTAe Educational Times " . 


xliii 


The Daily News ' 


xliv 


TAe Newsman " 


xlv 


The Cambridge Independent Press" . 


xlv 


The Sunday Times " 


xlv 


The Morning Advertiser " 


xlvi 


The Court Circular" 


xlvi 


Public Opinion ' . . 


xlvi 



%\t famtixabmu an tk Qwttn'i (itgli^ 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 



The Edinburgh Review. 

Mr. Washington Moon amused himself by 
demonstrating that while the Dean undertook 
to instruct others, the author was himself but 
a castaway in matters of grammar. The Dean's 
style is neither particularly elegant nor correct, 
and his adversary sometimes hits him hard ; 
besides in one or two cases successfully dis- 
puting his judgments. 



The Westminster Review. 

The Dean has laid himself open to criticism 
as much for bad taste as for questionable syn- 
tax. His style of writing is awkward and 
slovenly, that of his antagonist remarkably 
terse and clear, and bearing witness to a sensi- 
tiveness of ear and taste which are glaringly 
deficient in his opponent. 




xxvi EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

The Dublin Review. 

Every reader of Dean Alford's * Queen? s Eng- 
4 lish ' should make himself acquainted with * The 
'Dean's English', by Mr. G. Washington Moon. 
He has exposed certain literary trips on the part 
of his antagonist, in an amusing and telling way, 
and has put together a smart little volume 
which is well worth the reading. We think 
that even practised writers may learn a lesson 
or two in the art of expressing themselves in 
their mother tongue clearly and correctly, by a 
perusal, both of the Dean's 4 Stray Notes ' and 
of Mr. Moon's rejoinder. 



The London Review. 

Both Dean Alford's book on l The Queen's 
'English', and Mr. G. Washington Moon's slash- 
ing commentary on the same, entitled ' The 
' Dean's English 1 , in which he certainly makes 
mincemeat of a good deal of his opponent's 
composition, are calculated to render consider- 
able service to loose thinkers, speakers, and 
writers ; and certainly both are very enter- 
taining. Mr. Moon's volume points out some 
serious errors of style ; it diminishes the pre- 
tensions of a censor who, though himself ren- 
dering good service to the purity of our tongue^ 
is certainly not entitled to be so loftily severe 
on others ; and it has the relish and zest of a 
sharp passage of arms. 




EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

The London Quarterly Review. 
The books which come next are those of Dean 
Alford and Mr. Moon. Last year the former 
contributed some interesting papers to ' Good 
'Words' on the 'Queen's English'. Like a 
liege subject, he entered the lists against the foes 
of his sovereign lady, and had already un- 
horsed some pretenders, when, lo ! another 
knight — and no carpet knight — appeared upon 
the arena, and charged the Dean ; accusing 
him of having been guilty of the very viola- 
tions of law and good taste which he had con- 
demned in others. These doughty champions 
ended their feud in peace. But Mr. Moon may 
say, " What I have written, I have written". 

Mr. Moon knows the secrets of both the 
strength and the grace of his own tongue ; and 
should, we think, follow up the good impression 
he has produced, by publishing something that 
might help young writers to the acquisition of 
a pure and nervous style. 



The British and Foreign Evangelical Review. 
■Readers will remember Dean Alford's papers 
on ' The Queen's English'' in 'Good Words', and 
the correspondence they provoked. Mr. Moon 
was one of the Dean's adversaries, and fired off 
a pamphlet against him, which called forth a 
rejoinder from the warlike Dean. But the 
critic laid himself open to a cross fire, and got 
criticised to his heart's content. Many thought 
Mr. Moon had by no means the worst of it in 
the war of words and strife of tongues. 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

The Weekly Review. 
Dr. Alford, Dean of Canterbury, is known as 
a devout and accomplished minister— as an ex- 
cellent preacher— as the author of a critical and 
expository edition of the Greek Testament, which 
is an evidence of his industry and research, if 
not of profound scholarship— and as the writer 
of one or two fair specimens of poetical compo- 
sition. In addition to the claims which any or 
all of the foregoing may give him on public 
confidence and regard, the Dean has been de- 
sirous to assert for himself the reputation of a 
philologist and grammarian, and to place him- 
self in the position of arbiter and oracle on the 
subject of the "Queen's English". Mr. Moon 
is not disposed to bow to Dean Alford in this 
matter, and in reply to the Anglican clergy- 
man's 'Queen's English 1 has come forth with 
4 The Dean's English'. It is a pretty generally 
received opinion that the ecclesiastic has got 
the worst of it. 

Mr. Moon not only shows (in several instances 
at least) that Dr. Alford is wrong in the ex ca- 
thedra judgments he pronounces as to ce rtain 
popular forms of speech, but demonstrates that 
the Dean's whole papers are specimens of slip- 
shod writing, and abound with inelegancies, if 
not inaccuracmLof composition. 

/ \ 

The Social Science Review. 

In calmly reviewing the whole matter, we can- 
not but feel that Mi'. Moon lias come off the 



^ 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

victor; and if there are some few remarks of 
a strictly personal character, that Ave would 
rather have seen omitted from this second edi- 
tion of his work, we must admit that it is a 
smart piece of verbal prose criticism, and is of 
more than passing interest. Mr. Moon well 
performs his self-imposed task : he evinces a 
fine sense of discernment in the niceties of lan- 
guage ; and, while severely criticising the sen- 
tences of his opponent, shows that he himself 
knows how to write in a remarkably clear, 
terse, and vigorous style. 

We have only to add, that we have read 
1 The Deceits English ' with pleasure, and we 
can recommend this carefully prepared work — 
which does credit alike to author and publisher 
— to all who are interested in the study of lan- 
guage, or desire to sharpen their wits by the 
perusal of a little Cobbett-like criticism. 



The Journal of Sacred Literature. 

The critic's calling is exceedingly difficult, and 
requires for its successful prosecution an aggre- 
gate of moral and intellectual excellencies which 
few men possess. Again, it is a very difficult 
thing to speak and to write good English ; yet 
everybody thinks he can both speak and write 
it, and most men fancy they can criticize it too. 
But the difficulty of producing unexceptionable 
English, lays open to censure almost all writers 
and speakers. Dean Alford is an example : we 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

know him to be a popular writer, and we believe 
him to be a good one ; but he is not faultless, 
and, having been tempted in an evil hour to 
turn critic, he has brought upon himself a 
deluge of criticism. Mr. Moon in particular 
overwhelms him with accusations, to some of 
which we fear he must plead guilty. We read 
Dean Alford's book on the Queen's English, 
with considerable pleasure, and gathered out of 
it some useful hints, but we felt, at the same 
time, that he employed constructions which 
were doubtful, and that his opinions did not 
always agree with what we had been led to 
regard as good usage. 

Mr. Moon has raised a far larger number of 
objections than occurred to us, and the volume 
in which he embodies them is one of the smart- 
est pieces of criticism we ever read. It is not 
only admirable as a specimen of critical style, 
but it abounds in suggestions which no man 
in his senses can undervalue : more than this, 
it is a delightful example of good writing. The 
vigour of the critic is sometimes almost like 
severity, but we doubt whether it is ever mali- 
cious, and so we enjoy the book and learn from 
it at one and the same time. 



The Phonetic Journal. 

If, as some good people hold, everybody and 
everything is created, not merely for a general, 
but moreover for some specific, purpose, then we 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

might infer that the particular use to which 
Nature destined the Dean of Canterbury was to 
set himself up to lecture upon the Queen's 
English, and so to offer himself as a conspicuous 
mark, and a defenceless victim, to the scathing 
criticism and merciless exposure of Mr. George 
Washington Moon. Not for many years, have 
we seen such a brilliant and effective passage of 
arms, as is contained in the little book under 
notice, which consists principally of three letters 
addressed to Dr. Alford. To say, that the poor 
Dean is worsted in the encounter, is to say very 
little. His defeat is almost too complete. Like 
an untrained youth, in the grasp of an athlete, 
he never has even a chance. At every round, 
he is quickly thrown ; and the blows, given 
with a will, and planted with a precision and 
vigour, which no feint can elude, fail fast and 
heavily on his defenceless head. At every 
point, the Dean is confronted by his pertinacious 
and inexorable assailant, who leaves him no 
possibility of escape ; or, if he does occasion- 
ally attempt a feeble defence, it only serves to 
bring down upon himself still severer punish- 
ment, until, exhausted by the encounter, he 
does that, which, for his own sake, he had 
better have done at first — makes peace with his 
adversary while yet he is in the way with him. 
To set one's self up for a teacher of English, 
pure and undefined ; jauntily to ascend the 
rostrum, as one gifted with authority to lay 
down the whole law ; and then to be met with 
such a withering exposure of incompetence, 

C 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

with such inevitable inferences of imbecility, 
as constitute the staple of Mr. Moon's book ; 
for the physician, who gratuitously obtrudes 
his advice upon us, and vaunts his ability to 
cure our disorder, — for him to be convicted of 
labouring under a virulent form of the same 
disease, certainly this is not a pleasant position 
for a man to occupy, and we heartily commiser- 
ate the unfortunate Dean. 

Even in the fair field of criticism he is quite 
unable to cope with his skilful and alert adver- 
sary. Never was there a more conspicuous 
instance of going out to shear, and coming 
home shorn. For our own part, we would 
rather have submitted to a month's stone- 
breaking than have called down upon ourselves 
such withering sarcasms and incisive irony as 
Dr. Alford's language has so justly provoked. 

To those who are interested in speaking and 
writing good English,— and what educated per- 
son is not? — this book is full of instruction; 
and to those who enjoy a controversy, conducted 
with consummate skill, and in excellent taste 
by a strong man, well armed, it is such a treat 
as does not fall in one's way often during a life- 
time. Regarded in itself, and without any 
immediate reference to its object, this book 
affords a model of correct and elegant English ; 
such as it is a perfect treat to meet with, in 
these days of slip-shod writing. Perspicuous, 
compact and nervous in its construction, it is 
by no means deficient in some of the higher and 
more brilliant qualities of style; while, for re- 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

fined sarcasm and covert irony, it has rarely 
been equalled. We can assure our readers 
that a pleasanter or more profitable employ- 
ment than the perusal of this book, it would be 
difficult to recommend to them. 

Many of our public writers, highly educated, 
and perhaps because they have been so educated, 
undertake English composition as if it were the 
one exceptional art which required no rules but 
the a rule of thumb." To such, the lamentable 
fiasco of the Dean, owing to his disregard of 
rules, should be a lesson, but, too probably, 
will not. We cannot help wishing that a writer 
who is so eminently qualified as Mr. Moon to 
teach a subject which, just now, so greatly 
needs to be taught, and who illustrates so 
admirably by his example the precepts that he 
so clearly enforces, would devote himself to 
the task of drawing up a code of rules for 
composition, such as our journalists and period- 
ical writers might appeal to, as a standard for 
correct English. We are of opinion that there 
is a crying want of such a work, that it would 
be one of the most useful anil most popular 
works of the day, and that Mr. Moon, with his 
thorough mastery of the subject, with his keen 
perception, nice judgment, and pellucid and 
elegant style, is just the person to write it. 
When a man displays peculiar aptitudes, and 
of a high order, for a given subject, we grieve, 
we almost resent it, if our natural expectations 
should remain unfulfilled. We feel that to be 
defeated of our hopes is, in some sense, to be 

c 2 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

defrauded of our rights. We think we have a 
right to call upon Mr. Moon, now that he has 
once exhibited this shining talent, not to wrap 
it up again in a napkin, but to put it out to 
interest, and we have no doubt of its bringing 
him back most abundant returns. We enter- 
tain this opinion notwithstanding Mr. Moon's 
disclaimer that " very little can be added to 
the canons of criticism already laid down ; 
though very much may be done for the per- 
manent enriching of our language, by popular 
writers using more care as to the examples 
they set in composition, than as to the lessons 
they teach concerning it." It is precisely be- 
cause Mr. Moon teaches so well by example, 
that we would fain have him make this example 
the vehicle for the inculcation of precepts, and 
the execution of the work the best comment 
upon, and illustration of, its rules. 



The Recokd. 



Readeks remember a series of papers on 
1 The Queen's English' by Dean Alford, which 
first appeared in * Good Words \ Immediately 
on the publication of the first paper, the learned 
Dean was inundated with epistolary comments, 
critiques, and remonstrances by volunteer critics 
from all parts of the country. The most for- 
midable of these assailants was the redoubtable 
Mr. Moon, who, after a preliminary skirmish or 
two in private, came out with a positive 
pamphlet. The Dean replied, and Mr. Moon 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS, 

returned again and again to the charge. The 
final result is that the Dean's essays are col- 
lected into a revised volume, and Mr. Moon's 
have settled down and completed themselves 
in another. Most readers will, we believe, 
think with us that Mr. Moon comes cleanest out 
of the controversy, and has in every way the 
best of the argument. The Dean entered 
the arena with a light jaunty step, and spoke 
with the air, and in the tone, of a man whose 
decision was to be final ; all he said at first was 
quite ex cathedra, and bore the look of being 
said by one whose ipse dixit was to settle all 
strife about words : a very Daniel in the person 
of a Dean had come to judgment. But he 
speedily had to lower his pretensions. Mr. 
Moon cried, "Physician, heal thyself. Before 
you attempt to teach us how to use the Queen's 
English, see that you know how to write it your- 
self." Coming out for wool, in fact, the Dean 
went back shorn ; rushing forth to teach, he 
went home taught. We can cordially recom- 
mend Mr. Moon's volume. It is really an able 
critique. The argument is conducted with 
admirable temper, and no reader can finish the 
volume without learning many valuable lessons 
in English composition, and some other things 
well worth knowing. 



The Churchman. 



Mr. Moon has performed a public service by 
his exposure of the errors into which men of 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

even the position of Dean Alford fall when they 
attempt to write English. The amusing speci- 
mens of ungrammatical and slovenly sentences 
which are here collected will serve, we hope, to 
warn authors against similar offences, and we 
think Mr. Moon entitled to the gratitude of all 
lovers of our language in its purity for this ex- 
posure of the Dean's English. 



The Church Review. 

We do not wonder to see the collection of Mr. 
Washington Moon's criticisms in their third 
edition. The vigour with which he has at- 
tacked unlucky Dean Alford, and the awkward 
way in which the latter struggles and kicks 
under the infliction, are very entertaining. It 
is curious to see mistakes and inelegancies per- 
petrated in English composition for one tithe of 
which in the classical languages the offenders 
would meet with severe castigation, and for 
which, indeed, they themselves would blush 
with shame. The book is one which we should 
wish to put into the hands of our young learner 
of English, that he may be upon his guard 
against current modes of speech, and the adop- 
tion of custom as a standard. 



The Church Standard. 

There is so much in this neatly printed volume 
to command our approval, that we cannot with- 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

hold our meed of praise. There is a great deal 
of sound and trenchant criticism, and the style 
is vigorous, versatile, and epigrammatic. 



The Christian Observer. 

We believe with Mr. Moon, that Dean Alford's 
English is singularly incorrect, and that the 
style of his reproofs is utterly indefensible. 



The Christian News. 

To fathers of families this book will be worth 
more than all the money which they are now 
paying for their children's grammar. In many 
of the criticisms, the acumen displayed by Mr. 
Moon is of no common kind. His letters are 
models of English composition, and are so full 
of animation, so sharp, lively, and trenchant, 
that it is quite a treat to read them. He has 
demonstrated beyond dispute that the Dean of 
Canterbury, who sets himself up as a defender 
of the English language, commits the most 
culpable blunders in writing it. The formida- 
ble indictment is supported with an ability and 
acuteness we have seldom seen excelled. Mr. 
Moon writes with greater elegance, with greater 
ease, with greater perspicuity, with greater 
vigour, and with incomparably greater accuracy, 
than his opponent. He has rendered a dry and 
forbidding subject both pleasing and profitable. 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

Though there is a remorseless exactness about 
his criticisms which makes one feel as if the 
writing of proper English were a hopeless 
attempt, there is really nothing of the true 
pedant about him any more than there is about 
the sturdy Dean himself. Both volumes are 
equally free from pedantry, and both, though 
in different senses, we can recommend to all 
who take any interest in the subject. 



The London Christian Times. 

There are but few of our readers, we presume, 
who have not already heard of this work ; but 
we are nevertheless glad of an opportunity of 
expressing the opinion we entertain of its merits, 
and of urging the perusal of it upon all our 
friends, especially upon those who have read 
4 The Queerfs English.'' The raciness and smart- 
ness of these criticisms invest a dry subject 
with interest. The frequent discomfiture of the 
warlike Dean will amuse all persons, and we 
have no doubt that the contents of this book will 
enliven many a fireside during these long, dark, 
winter evenings. We shall be mistaken if 
the perusal of it does not lead, amongst the 
members of many domestic circles, to a good- 
humoured criticism, for a time, of each other's 
words and sentences. The result will be in- 
creasing correctness in the phraseology em- 
ployed ; and that the end of both the Dean and 
his critic will be in some good degree realised. 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

We have spoken of " the discomfiture of the 
" warlike Dean," and we cannot doubt, that, on 
the whole, this word fitly describes the result of 
this smart passage of arms. The Dean advanced 
with the bearing of one who deemed that he had 
no superior, if indeed, any equal. He did not 
imagine that anyone would be found daring 
enough to confront him, and to dispute the 
positions he had assumed. Mr. Moon, with 
little delay or ceremony, attacked and repulsed 
him ; caring nothing for offended dignity, .or 
anything else, save the vindication of the truth. 
It is impossible not to see that he is fond of a 
brush. He goes about his work and prosecutes 
it con amove. 

Scarcely a page occurs in this small volume 
in which the Dean is not proved to have fallen 
into errors, either of grammar, construction, 
orthography, or pronunciation. Whenever he 
shall write again in defence of the Queen's 
English, he will, no doubt, write with greater 
care. He has done the public good service by 
introducing the subject ; but the advantage 
gained will be owing, in a very great degree, to 
the criticisms of his accomplished and keen- 
eyed antagonist. 



The Nonconformist. 



There is really something quite refreshing 
about Mr. Moon's Irocliures. He must excuse 
our confessing to a slight sense of amusement, 
on a first perusal of his strictures on the Dean. 



xl EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

The spirit of hearty vehemence by which they 
were pervaded only failed to elicit our complete 
sympathy, because it seemed to us that the 
object of so vigorous an assault was after all a 
" man of straw". The faults of style, and even 
of grammatical structure, in Dean Alford's 
essays, were so obvious that a less grave mode 
of exposure would have seemed to us more 
appropriate. However, we thank Mr. Moon 
very cordially for what he has done, and have 
no hesitation in saying that he has so far suc- 
ceeded in his vindication of pure and correct, 
as opposed to lax and slipshod, English, as to 
deserve the gratitude of those who, like our- 
selves, deem our mother tongue, in all its 
restraints as well as in all its liberties, to be 
one of the most precious inheritances of Eng- 
lishmen. 



The Patriot. 



One would have thought that the Dean, in re- 
plying to animadversions upon his style, would 
have written with especial care ; instead of this, 
his second article contains more and grosser 
faults than his first. The Dean boldly avows 
his disrespect for Lindley Murray, treats him 
with as little reverence as Colenso treats Moses, 
and forthwith proceeds, somewhat flagrantly, 
to exemplify his boasted ignorance of the whole- 
some rules according to which all of good English 
that we knew at school was flogged into us. 
Had this been the Dean's schoolboy experience 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. xli 

too, we cannot help thinking that it would have 
been better for him now. Mr. Moon gives the 
Dean a severe castigation for more than offences 
against the Queen's English ; and we are bound, 
in justice, to say that the Dean has fairly pro- 
voked it. Had he been a little less self-opin- 
ionated, and a little more respectful towards one 
who appears to have addressed him, in the first 
instance; with all gentlemanly courtesy, Mr. 
Moon would not, probably, have appeared in 
print. As it is, while we cannot altogether ex- 
tenuate the tone of Mr. Moon's second letter, 
we are compelled to say that Dean Alford's 
paper singularly lacks both the simplicity of a 
great mind and the deference of a great scholar. 
Mr. Moon is no meddling ignoramus. He is by 
no means impeccable himself ; but, as a master 
of the English language, he is far superior to 
the Dean. 



The English Journal of Education. 

The Dean of Canterbury, apparently desirous 
of emulating a fellow-dignitary, whose hearty 
and learned labours in the mine of our lan- 
guage have opened up veins of richness few 
ever dreamed of, has published an article en- 
titled k A Plea for the Queers English 1 . The 
work we review is a reply to the Dean's 
production. We are greatly obliged to Mr. 
Moon for taking up the matter. It would have 
been a pity to have allowed the Dean to escape 



xBi EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

a castigation he deserved. We do not expect 
the physician who attends us to be exempt from 
all complaints at all times. He is mortal, and 
subject to mortal ills. But if we find him 
giving us advice as to a course of physic or 
diet, which course he himself does not follow 
when he is similarly afflicted, we give him 
credit for either insincerity or ignorance. The 
Dean sets himself up as a healer of the sick- 
nesses brought by careless habit on the " Queen's 
" English" ; but, while pointing out those com- 
plaints and prescribing their remedies, he was 
labouring under similar maladies, whose exist- 
ence in himself he utterly ignored, or repre- 
sented as virtues rather than otherwise, when 
Mr. Moon privately pointed them out to him. 
Such a doctor merits no confidence, and the 
exposure of his incapacity is a public good. 
In light, lively writing, strict correctness of 
diction and arrangement is not requisite. For 
our recreation reading, the stately periods of 
Robertson would be intolerable ; but Dickens's 
brilliant page, utterly ignoring stops and vio- 
lating all rules of composition, is delightfully 
fresh and grateful. Dashing leaders in the 
papers we do not expect to find reducible to 
strict principles like those laid down by Karnes 
or Campbell. But when a man seriously pre- 
tends to be writing to amend faults, his own 
style should be faultless, especially when he 
speaks in the tone of calm, self-assured supe- 
riority to vulgar error which the Dean of 
Canterbury assumes. It would occupy too 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. xliii 

much space were we to give a resume of 
the contents of Mr. Moon's clever work. 
We coincide with all his strictures on the 
Dean's article, and do not doubt that, with 
ourselves, he could have pointed to many more 
egregious blunders on the part of this new 
would-be critic. We advise all our readers to 
see Mr. Moon's reply. Written in pure, for- 
cible, elegant, and classic English — perfect in 
composition and punctuation, and in its gentle- 
manly dignity so opposed to the slipshod, 
half-vulgar easiness of the Dean's * Plea 1 — it 
merits the attention of all students of our 
tongue, and shows that though in familiar talk 
and writing we may be as men at home — free 
and at our ease— there is not wanting amongst 
us that covert stateliness and rigid propriety 
which a weighty subject demands. 



The Educational Times. 

This is a continuation of the now somewhat 
notorious controversy between Dean Alford and 
Mr. Washington Moon, on certain points arising 
out of the publication of the Dean's * Plea for 
Hhe Queen's English', which Mr. Moon seems 
to have considered to be itself far from free 
from the very faults of grammar and diction it 
professed to hold up to reprobation. We 
think that in this linguistic passage of arms 
Mr. Moon has decidedly the best of it. 



xliv EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 



The Daily News. 

Dean Alford could hardly have reflected upon 
what he was about to do when he sat down 
to write an easy, gossipy sort of paper for 4 Good 
1 Words' on the subject of common errors in 
speaking and in writing English. He certainly 
did not expect his free remarks to be so sharply 
challenged as they have been. And he finds 
himself engaged in a kind of controversy for 
which neither his natural turn of mind, nor his 
particular training has fitted him. His own 
style is at times so poor, so loose in the joints, 
so deficient in clear and sensitive perception of 
the proper force of words, that people have 
naturally wondered as to how this writer, above 
all others, could have been led to assume the 
critic's function. He sticks to it, however ; 
revises and republishes his strictures, and 
seems not to have the least idea that he has 
been beaten in the battle. Mr. Moon, there- 
fore, his foremost antagonist, gives him here 
the benefit of a third letter in answer to his 
4 Plea Number Three' The Dean is clearly in 
error in his contempt for the grammarians. 
He might very properly enlighten them if he 
could show that they have framed some of their 
rules on too narrow grounds, but he is himself 
a warning example against the neglect of 
regular English teaching in our great schools. 
It may be hoped that he will improve — he cer- 
tainly ought under Mr. Moon's instructions. 



EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. xlv 



Tns Newsman. 

Greatly as we fear that the Dean of Canterbury 
has failed to establish his claim to be regarded 
as an authority on the Queen's English, we, by 
no means, regret the appearance of his present 
work ; and for this reason — had there never 
been ' The Queen's English \ there would pro- 
bably never have been ' The Dean's English'' ; 
and had there never been 4 The Dean's English\ 
the world would have lost a very valuable con- 
tribution to English philology, and one of the 
most masterly pieces of literary criticism in 
the language. 



The Cambridge Independent Press. 

It is written with a power of sarcasm and 
criticism rarely excelled. Mr. Moon is a 
brilliant writer ; his work is full of point, 
sound in English, and deserves to be generally 
read. 



The Sunday Times. 

Mr. Moon has rendered a real service to litera- 
ture in this exposure of Dean Alford, and we 
are glad to express our recognition of the value 
of his labours. 



xlvi EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS. 

The Morning Advertiser. 

It is one of the smartest pieces of prose - 
criticism we have chanced to meet with for 
many a day. 



The Court Circular. 

All who are interested in such critical discus- 
sions as are so clearly and accurately carried on 
in this little book will be grateful to Mr. Moon 
not only for much solid instruction, but for 
much entertainment also. 



Public Opinion. 



A critical study of the English language is 
always a pleasant task ; it is here rendered 
doubly agreeable by the happy style of the 
author of ' The DearCs English \ 



THE DEAFS ENGLISH: 

A CRITICISM. 



To the Very Ret. Henry Alford, d.d., 
Dean" of Canterbury. 

Rev. Sir, 

On the publication of your ' Plea for 
6 the Queen's JSnglish ' * I was surprised to 
observe inaccuracies in the structure of 
your sentences and more than one gram- 
matical error. Under ordinary circum- 
stances I should not have taken notice 
of such deviations from what is strictly 
correct in composition ; but the subject of 
your essay being the Queen's English, my 
attention was naturally drawn to the 

* 4 A Plea for the Queen's English \ by the Dean 
of Canterbury : 4 Good Words', March, 1863. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH, 

language you had employed ; and as, when 
I privately wrote to you respecting it, 
you justified your use of the expressions 
to which I had referred, I am desirous of 
knowing whether such expressions are 
really allowable in writings, and especially 
whether they are allowable in an essay 
which has for its object the exposure and 
correction of literary inaccuracies. I there- 
fore publish this my second letter to you ; 
and I do so to draw forth criticism upon 
the rules involved in this question ; that, 
the light of various opinions being made 
to converge upon these rules, their value 
or their worthlessness may thereby be 
manifested. I make no apology for this 
course; for when, by your violations of 
syntax and your defence of those viola- 
tions, you teach that Campbell's i Philoso- 
phy of Rhetoric ', Karnes's i Elements of 
Criticism ', and Blair's ' Lectures on Rhe- 
toric and Belles Lettres ' are no longer to 
be our guides in the study of the English 
language, no apology is needed from me 
for asking the public whether they con- 
firm the opinion that these hitherto ac- 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 8 

knowledged authorities should be super- 
seded. 

To spread this enquiry widely is the 
more necessary, because, on account of 
the position which you hold, and the 
literary reputation which you enjoy, your 
modes of expression, if suffered to pass 
unchallenged, will, probably, by-and-by be 
quoted in justification of the style of other 
writers who shall presume to damage by 
example, if not by precept, the highway 
of thought over which all desire to 
travel. 

By influential example it is that Ian- The power 

of example. 

guages are moulded into whatever form 
they take ; therefore, according as example 
is for good or for evil, so will a language 
gain in strength, sweetness, precision, and 
elegance, or will become weak, harsh, 
unmeaning, and barbarous. Great writers 
may make or may mar a language. It is 
with them, and not with grammarians, 
that the responsibility rests ; for language 
is what custom makes it ; and custom is, 
has been, and always will be, more influ- 
enced by example than by precept. 

2 



guages. 



4 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

beii on^Se ^ r# Campbell, speaking of the formation 
formation of i angua g es? justly says : *— " Language 
" is purely a species of fashion, in which 
" by the general, but tacit, consent of the 
" people of a particular state or country, 
" certain sounds come to be appropriated 
" to certain things as their signs, and 
"certain ways of inflecting and combining 
" those sounds come to be established as 
" denoting the relations which subsist 
" among the things signified. It is not 
" the business of grammar, as some critics 
" seem preposterously to imagine, to give 
" law to the fashions which regulate our 
" speech. On the contrary, from its con- 
" formity to these, and from that alone, it 
" derives all its authority and value. For, 
" what is the grammar of any language ? 
"It is no other than a collection of general 
" observations methodically digested, and 
" comprising all the modes previously and 
" independently established, by which the 
" significations, derivations, and combi- 
" nations of words in that language are 

* Campbell's ' Philosophy of Rhetoric \ vol. i, book 
2. chap. 1, 2. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

"ascertained. It is of no consequence 
44 here to what causes originally these 
44 modes or fashions owe their existence — 
" to imitation, to reflection, to affectation, 
44 or to caprice ; they no sooner obtain and 
" become general than they are the laws 
" of the language, and the grammarian's 
44 only business is to note, collect, and 
" methodise them." " ' But,' it may be 
" said, 4 if custom, which is so capricious 
44 c and unaccountable, is everything in 
44 4 language, of what significance is either 
44 4 the grammarian or the critic ?' Of 
44 considerable significance notwithstand- 
" ing ; and of most then, when they con- 
"fine themselves to their legal depart- 
44 ments, and do not usurp an authority 
" that does not belong to them. The 
44 man who, in a country like ours, 
"should compile a succinct, perspicuous, 
" and faithful digest of the laws, though 
"no lawgiver, would be universally ac- 
knowledged to be a public benefactor. 
"How easy would that important branch 
" of knowledge be rendered by such a 
44 work, in comparison with what it must 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



" be, when we have nothing to have re- 
course to, but a labyrinth of statutes, 
"reports, and opinions. That man also 
" would be of considerable use, though 
" not in the same degree, who should 
" vigilantly attend to every illegal practice 
" that was beginning to prevail, and should 
"evince its danger by exposing its con- 
trariety to law. Of similar benefit, 
" though in a different sphere, are gram- 
"mar and criticism. In language, the 
"grammarian is properly the compiler 
" of the digest ; and the verbal critic, 
"the man who seasonably notifies the 
" abuses that are creeping in. Both tend 
" to facilitate the study of the tongue to 
"strangers, and to render natives more 
"perfect in the knowledge of it, to ad- 
"vance general use into universal, and 
"to give a greater stability at least, if 
" not a permanency, to custom, that most 
"mutable thing in nature." 
••Thou" and I have quoted these passages because 
they have direct reference to the subject 
under consideration ; for I do not find 
fault with the critical remarks in your 



4 thee ' 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 1 

essay. Many cf them, it is true, are not 
new ; but most of them are good, and 
therefore will bear re-perusal ; yet, I 
must say, it was scarcely necessary to 
repeat in the March number of c Good 
' Words', the meaning of "avocation" which 
Archbishop Whately had given in the 
same magazine in the previous August. 
And so far from its being " so well known 
" a fact " that we reserve the singular pro- 
nouns "thou" and "thee" "entirety for 
" our addresses in prayer to Him who is 
"the highest Personality", it is not a 
fact. These pronouns are very extensively 
and very properly used in poetry, even 
when inanimate objects are addressed ; as 
is the case in the following lines from 
Coleridge's Q Address to Mont Blanc': — 

" dread and silent Mount ! I gazed upon thee 
" Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, 
" Didst vanish from my thought : entranced in prayer 
" I worshipped the Invisible alone." 

However, I shall not notice your critical influence of 

popular 

remarks, for they are of only secondary writers. 
importance. Very little can be added to 



8 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

the canons of criticism already laid down ; 
very much may be done for the perma- 
nent enriching of onr language, by popular 
writers exercising more care as to the 
examples they set in composition, than as 
to the lessons they teach concerning it. 
Throwing "But. in literature especially, it has al- 

stones. * - ' 

ways been so much easier for authors to 
censure than to guide by example, and it 
has been thought by them so much better 
fun to break other authors' windows than 
to stay quietly at home taking care of 
their own, that the throwing of stones has 
long been a favourite amusement. Nor. 
do we object to it, providing two things 
be granted: first, that the glass of the 
windows is so bad that the objects seen 
through it appear distorted; and, secondly 
that in no spirit of unkindness shall the 
stones be thrown, lest you not only break 
the author's windows, but also wound the 
author himself. 
Persuasive It must be admitted that there is in 

teaching. 

your essay so little of that " sweetness of 
" the lips " which " increaseth learning ", 
that but a very small amount of good can 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

result to those whom you think to be most 
in need of improvement. You speak of 
" the vitiated and pretentious style which 
" p>ctsses current in our newspapers ". Tou 
sneeringly say, "In a leading article of 
" ' The Times ' not long since, was this 
" beautiful piece of slipshod English": then 
follows the quotation, with this remark 
appended, " Here we see faults enough be- 
dsides the wretched violations of grammar" ; 
and, M these tor iters are constantly doing 
"something like this".* Then you say, 
"Sometimes the editors of our papers 

* " When it is considered that in every newspaper 
of any pretensions there are articles, letters, and 
paragraphs, from thirty or fifty different pens, there 
is not much to be astonished at in occasional blunders. 
If the Dean knew more of newspaper matters he 
would be more charitable in his criticism. Is it fair 
to expect in a leading article composed at midnight, 
against time, and carried off to the printers slip by 
slip as it is written, the same rhythmical beauty and 
accuracy of expression as in any essay elaborated by 
the labour of many days for a quarterly review ? 
Yet the English of the Dean, corrected and recor- 
rected, pales before that of ' The Times ' written per- 
haps by a wearied man at two in the morning." — 
k The Christian NewsJ Glasgow % 



10 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

"fall, from their ignorance, into absurd 
" mistakes ". Certainly not a very haj)py 
arrangement of words in which to remark 
upon the "absurd mistakes" of other 
people ; for we ought to be as careful 
what our sentences suggest, as what they 
affirm ; and we are so accustomed to speak 
of people falling from a state or position, 
that your words naturally suggest the 
absurb idea of editors falling from their 
ignorance. 
Editors fan- I submit it to the reviewers whether 

Ing from 

ranee ignor " y our sentence be not altogether faulty. 
Thfe words, " from their ignorance " should 
not come after " fall ", they should precede 
it. But, for the reason just given, the 
word " from " is objectionable in any part 
of the sentence, which would have been 
better written thus, Sometimes our editors, 
in consequence of their ignorance, fall 
into absurb mistakes. If you say that 
the defect in perspicuity is removed by 
the punctuation, I answer, in the language 
of Lord Karnes, " Punctuation may re- 
"move an ambiguity, but will never 
" produce that peculiar beauty which is 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 11 

"perceived when the sense comes out 
^^Clearly and distinctly by means of a 
u happy arrangement ". The same high 
authority tells us that a circumstance 
ought never to be placed between two 
capital members of a sentence ; or if it 
be so placed, the first word in the con- 
sequent member should be one that 
cannot connect it with what precedes. In 
your sentence, unfortunately, the connec- 
tion is perfect, and the suggestion of a 
ridiculous idea is the result. 

• Nor is this the only instance of this " Composi- 
tors with- 

kind of faulty arrangement. You say, °£*^ e e t 
"The great enemies to understanding £° ™ punc " 
" anything printed in our language are 
" the commas. And these are inserted by 
"the compositors without the slightest 
" compunction ". I should say that the 
great enemy to our understanding these 
sentences of yours is the want of commas ; 
for though the defective position of words 
can never be compensated for by commas, 
they do frequently help to make the sense 
clearer, and would do so in this instance. 
How can we certainly know that the words 



12 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" without the slightest compunction" refer 
to " inserted ?" They seem, by their order 
in the sentence, to describe the character 
of the compositors ; — they are " without 
"the slightest compunction". And then 
that word " compunction "/ what an ill- 
chosen word of which to make use when 
speaking of punctuation. But this is only 
on a par with what occurs in the first 
paragraph of your essay, where you speak 
of people " mending their icays "/ and in 
the very next paragraph you speak of the 
" Queen's highway ", and of "byroads" 
and "private roads ". 
" Composi- But to return. Not only do you describe 

tors with- 
out any the poor compositors as beings "without 

" any compunction " ; but also as beings 

" without any mercy ". The sentence runs 

thus : " These i shrieks ', as they have been 

"called, are scattered up and down the 

" page by compositors without any mercy". 

I have often heard of " printers devils ", 

and I imagined them to be the boys who 

assist in the press-room; but if your 

description of compositors is true, these 

are beings of an order very little superior. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 13 

Byrthe-way, while noticing these ghost lv " introduce 

J *> ? o cj the body". 

existences, I may just remark that imme- 
diately after your speaking of " things 
u without life ", you startle us with that 
strange sentence of yours — " I will intro- 
" duce the body of my essay ". Introduce 
the body ! "We are prepared for much in 
these days of M sensation " writing ; and 
the very prevalence of the fashion for that 
style of composition predisposes any one 
of a quick imagination, to believe for the 
instant that your essay on the 'Quern's 
1 English'* is about to turn into a ' Strange 
1 Story \ 

"But to be more serious " as vou sav in a man 

losing his 

your essay, and then immediately give us mother i n 
a sentence in which the grave and the 
grotesque are most incongruously blended. 
I read, " A man does not lose his mother 
" now in the papers ". I have read figur- 
ative language which spoke of lawyers 
being lost in their papers, and students 
being buried in their books ; but I never 
read of a man losing his mother in the 
papers : therefore I do not quite see what 
the adverb " now " has to do in the 



14 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

sentence. Ah ! stop a moment. You did 
not mean to speak of a man losing his 
mother in the papers. I perceive by the 
context that what you intended to say 
was something of this sort : According to 
the papers, a man does not now lose his 
mother ; but that is a very different thing. 
How those little prepositions " from w and 
" in " do perplex you ; or rather, how 
greatly your misuse of them perplexes 
your readers. 
Misuse of With the adverbs also you are equally 

adverbs. J x 

at fault. You say, " In all abstract cases 
u where we merely speak of numbers the 
" verb is better singular." Here the placing 
of the adverb "merely" makes it a 
limitation of the following word " speak " ; 
and the question might naturally enough 
be asked, But what if we write of num- 
bers? The adverb, being intended to 
qualify the word " numbers ", should have 
been placed immediately after it. The 
sentence would then have read, "In all 
" abstract cases where we speak of num- 
" bers merely, the verb is better singular." 
So also in the sentence, "I only bring 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 15 

u forward some things ", the adverb "only" 
is similarly misplaced ; for, in the follow- 
ing sentence, the words "Plenty more 
" might be said ", show that the " only " 
refers to the " some things ", and not to 
the fact of your bringing them forward. 
The sentence should therefore have been, 
u I bring forward some things only. Plenty 
"more might be said." Again, you say 
" Still, though too many commas are bad, 
" too few are not without inconvenience 
" also." Here the adverb " also ", in 
consequence of its position, applies to 
" inconvenience " ; and the sentence signi- 
fies that too few commas are not with- 
out inconvenience besides being bad. 
Doubtless, what you intended was, " Still, 
u though too many commas are bad, too 
" few also are not without inconvenience." 

Blair, speaking of adverbs, says, " The Dr. Biair on 

. . adverbs. 

" fact is, with respect to such adverbs as 
" only, loholly, at least, and the rest of that 
" tribe, that, in common discourse, the 
" tone and emphasis we use in pronoun- 
" cing them, generally serves to show their 
" reference, and to make the meaning 



16 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" clear ; and hence we acquire the habit 
" of throwing them in loosely in the 
" course of a period. But in writing ", 
[and I wish you to notice this, because it 
bears upon a remark in your letter to me,] 
cc But in writing, where a man speaks to 
" the eye and not to the ear, he ought to be 
"more accurate, and so to connect those 
u adverbs with the words lohich they qualify 
" as to put his meaning out of doubt upon 
" the first inspection" 
On the con- In my former letter to you, I quoted as 

struction of 

sentences, the basis of some remarks I had to make, 
the well known rule that " those parts of 
" a sentence which are most closely con- 
nected in their meaning, should be as 
" closely as possible connected in position." 
In your reply you speak of my remarks 
as " the fallacious application of a supposed 
" rule." Whether my application of the 
rule be fallacious or not, let others judge 
from this letter ; and as to whether the rule 
itself be only "a supposed rule", or whether 
it is not, on the contrary, a standard rule 
emanating from the highest authorities, let 
the following quotations decide. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 11 

I read in Karnes's ' Elements of Criti- Lord 

Karnes's 

'eism?, "Words expressing things connected °P ini on. 
"in the thought, ought to be placed as 
" near together as possible." 

I read in Campbell's c Philosophy of Dr. cjamp- 
' Ehetoric\ " In English and other modern °P inion - 
" languages, the speaker doth not enjoy 
" that boundless latitude which an orator 
" of Athens or of Rome enjoyed when 
" haranguing in the language of his coun- 
"try. With us, who admit very few 
" inflections, the construction, and conse- 
u quently the sense^ depends almost entirely 
" on the order P 

I read in Blair's ' Lectures on JRhetoricvr. Biair'a 

opinion. 

c and Belles Lettres\ "The relation which 
" the words, or members of a period, bear 
"to one another, cannot be pointed out 
"in English, as in Greek or Latin, by 
" means of terminations ; it is ascertained 
" only by the position in which they 
" stand. Hence a capital rule in the 
" arrangement of sentences is, that the 
" words or members most nearly related 
" should be placed in the sentence, as 
" near to each other as possible ; so as 



18 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" to make their mutual relation clearly 
" appear." 

authorities. ^ ee a * so ' Murray* s Grammar\ part 2, 
in the Appendix ; likewise, c The Ele- 
c ments of English Composition^, by David 
Irving, ll.d., chapter 7 ; and the c Gram- 
c mar of Hhetoric\ by Alexander Jamieson, 
ll.d., chapter 3, book 3. 
t E h X e a Za- s ° f As an illustrative example of the vio- 
law of posi- lation of this rule, take the following 

tion. 

sentences. "It contained", says Swift, 
" a warrant for conducting me and my 
u retinue to Traldragdubb or Trildrog- 
" drib, for it is pronounced both ways, 
" as near as I can remember, by a party 
" of ten horse" The words in italics 
must be construed with the participle 
" conducting ", but they are placed so far 
from that word, and so near the word 
" pronounced ", that at first they suggest 
a meaning perfectly ridiculous. 

Again, in the course of a certain exam- 
ination which took place in the House of 
Commons in the year 1809, Mr. Dennis 
Browne said, the witness had been 
" ordered to withdraw from the bar in 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 19 

"consequence of being intoxicated, by 
" the motion of an honourable member." 
This remark, as might have been ex- 
pected, produced loud and general laughter. 
The speaker intended to say, that, " in 
" consequence of being intoxicated, the 
" witness, by the motion of an honourable 
11 member, had been ordered to withdraw 
" from the bar." 

A similar error occurs in a work by 
Isaac D'Israeli. He meant to relate that, 
" The beaux of that day, as well as the 
"women, used the abominable art of 
" painting their faces " ; but he writes, 
"The beaux of that day used the abo- 
" minable art of painting their faces, as 
" well as the women " ! 

In a recent number of a fashionable 
morning paper, there is a paragraph headed 
1 A Dangerous Cow', of which it is said not 
only that it tossed several persons, but that 
" it plunged and tossed about the street in 
" a formidable manner". It must indeed 
have been a dangerous cow. 

In your essay, you say, "I remember 
" when the French band of the ' Guides ' 

C 2 



20 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

u were in this country, reading in the 
" 'Illustrated News ' ". Were the French- 
men, when in this country, reading in the 
4 Illustrated News ' ? or did you mean that 
you remembered reading in the 'Illustrated 
'News', when the band of the French 
Guides, &c. ? 

You also say, "It is not so much of 
" the great highway itself of the Queen's 
" English that I would now speak, as of 
" some of the laws of the road ; the by- 
u rules, to compare small things with 
" great, which hang up framed at the 
" various stations ". What are the great 
things which hang up framed at the 
various stations ? If you meant that 
the by-rules hang up framed at the 
various stations, the sentence would have 
been better thus, " the laws of the road ; 
" or, to compare small things with great, 
" the by-rules which hang up framed at 
" the various stations ". 

So, too, in that sentence which intro- 
duces the body of your essay, you spea£ of 
" the reluctance which we in modern 
u Europe have to giving any prominence 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 21 

" to the personality of single individuals 
" in social intercourse " ; and yet it was 
evidently not of single individuals in 
social intercourse that you intended to 
speak, but of giving, in social inter- 
course, any prominence to the person- 
ality of single individuals. Your lan- 
guage expresses a meaning different from 
that which was intended : just as does 
Goldsmith's language when, in the fol- 
lowing tautological sentence, he says, 
" The Greeks, fearing to be surrounded 
" on all sides, wheeled about and halted, 
"with the river on their backs." Talk 
of Baron Munchausen ! Why, here was 
an army of Munchausens. They "wheeled 
" about and halted, toith the river on their 
" backs" 

Once more, you say, " When I hear a a sentence 

with a 

"person use a queer expression, or pro- squinting 

L x x 7 * construc- 

" nounce a name in reading differently tl0IU 
"from his neighbours, it always goes 
" down, in my estimate of him, with a 
" minus sign before it — stands on the side 
" of deficit, not of credit." Poor fellow ! 
So he falls in your estimation, merely 



22 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

because when " reading differently from 
" his neighbours," you hear him " pro- 
• ' nounce a name ". Would you have him 
pass over the names without pronouncing 
them? The fact is, that in the very 
words in which you censure a small fault 
of another person, you expose for censure 
a greater fault of your own. The pro- 
nunciation of proper names is a subject 
upon which philologists are not in every 
case unanimous ; and to differ where 
the wise are not agreed, if it be a fault, 
cannot be a great fault; but to publish 
a sentence like yours, having in it a 
clause with what the French call a 
"squinting construction",* is to commit 
a fault such as no one would expect to 
find in c A Plea for the Queen's English'. 
The words " in reading ", look two ways at 
once, and may be construed either with the 
words which precede, or with those which 
follow. We may understand you to say, 
" pronounce a name in reading "; or, " in 
" reading differently from his neighbours", 

* " Coristruction louche ". 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 23 

A more striking example of this ludicrous 
error could scarcely have been given. 

Dr. Campbell, in speaking of similar P r - Cam P- 

1 x o b e ll on con . 

instances of bad arrangement, says, " In SgSty. 
" all the above instances there is what 
" may be justly termed a constructive 
" ambiguity ; that is, the words are so 
" disposed in point of order, as to render 
" them really ambiguous, if, in that con- 
" struction which the expression first sug- 
" gests any meaning were exhibited. As 
u this is not the case, the faulty order of 
" the words cannot properly be considered 
" as rendering the sentence ambiguous, 
" but obscure. It may indeed be argued 
"that, in these and the like examples, 
" the least reflection in the reader will 
" quickly remove the obscurity. But 
" why is there any obscurity to be re- 
u moved ? Or why does the writer require 
" more attention from the reader, or the 
" speaker from the hearer, than is abso- 
lutely necessary? It ought to be re- 
" membered, that whatever application we 
" must give to the words, is, in fact, so 
u much deducted from what we owe to 



24 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" the sentiments. Besides, the effort that 
" is exerted in a very close attention to 
" the language, always weakens the effect 
" which the thoughts were intended to 
" produce in the mind. * By perspicuity', 
" as Quintillian justly observes, c care is 
" i taken, not that the hearer may under- 
" 4 stand, if he will, but that he must 
" c understand, whether he will or not.'* 
" Perspicuity, originally and properly^ 
"implies transparency ', such as may be 
" ascribed to air, glass, water, or any 
" other medium through which material 
" objects are viewed. From this original 
"and proper sense it has been meta- 
phorically applied to language; this 
" being, as it were, the medium through 
" which we perceive the notions and 
" sentiments of a speaker. Now, in cor- 
poreal things, if the medium through 
" which we look at any object is per- 
fectly transparent, our whole attention 
" is fixed on the object ; we are scarcely 
" sensible that there is a medium which 
"intervenes, and we can hardly be said 
* ^Instit \ lib. viii. caD. 2. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 25 

"to perceive it. But if there is any 
" flaw in the medium, if we see through 
"it but dimly, if the object is imper- 
" fectly represented, or if we know it to 
" be misrepresented, our attention is im- 
M mediately taken off the object to the 
"medium. We are then anxious to dis- 
" cover the cause, either of the dim and 
" confused representation, or of the mis- 
representation, of things which it ex- 
" hibits, that so the defect in vision may 
" be supplied by judgment. The case of 
" language is precisely similar. A dis- 
" course, then, excels in perspicuity when 
"the subject engrosses the attention of 
" the hearer, and the diction is so little 
" minded by him, that he can scarcely 
u be said to be conscious it is through 
" this medium he sees into the speaker's 
" thoughts. On the contrary, the least 
" obscurity, ambiguity, or confusion in the 
" style, instantly removes the attention 
" from the sentiment to the expression, 
" and the hearer endeavours, by the aid of 
" reflection, to correct the imperfections 
" of the speaker's language." 



J 



26 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

Perspicuity. j n contending for the law of. position 
as laid down by Lord Karnes, Dr. Camp- 
bell, arid others, I do so on the ground 
that the observance of this law contri- 
butes to that most essential quality in 
all writings, — perspicuity; and although 
I would not on any account wish to see 
all sentences constructed on one uniform 
plan, I maintain that the law of position 
must never be violated when such violation 
would in any way obscure the meaning. Let 
your meaning still be obvious, and you 
may vary your mode of expression as you 
please ; and your language will be the 
richer for the variation. Let your mean- 
ing be obscure, and no grace of diction, 
nor any music of a well-turned period, 
will make amends to your readers for 
their being liable to misunderstand you. 

Emphasis. In noticing my remarks upon this part 
of the subject, you say, "The fact is, 
u the rules of emphasis come in, in in- 
" terruption of your supposed general law 
K of position." Passing over the inelegant 
stuttering, " in, in, in" in this sentence, 
I reply to your observation. The rules 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 27 

of emphasis, and 'what you are pleased 
to call " the supposed general law of 
"position", are entirely independent of 
each other, and can no more clash than 
two parallel lines can meet. The rules 
of emphasis do not come " in, in in- 
u terruption of the general law of position." 
A sentence ought, under all circumstances, 
to be constructed accurately, whatever 
may chance to be the emphasis with 
which it will be read. A faulty construc- 
tion may be made intelligible by emphasis, 
but no dependence on emphasis will 
justify a faulty construction. Besides, 
if the sentence is ambiguous, how will 
emphasis assist the reader to the author's 
meaning ? Where shall he apply the 
emphasis? He must comprehend what 
is ambiguous, in order that what is am- 
biguous may by him be comprehended, 
which is an absurdity. 

Emphasis may be very useful to me 
in explaining to you my own meaning, or, 
in explaining another's meaning which I 
may understand ; but it can be of no use 
to me to explain that which I do not 



28 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



" And they 
did eat." 



Unallow- 
able ellipsis. 



understand. When to correctness of posi- 
tion is added justness of emphasis, your 
words will be weighty ; but when the 
first of these qualities is wanting, not the 
thunder of a Boanerges will compensate 
for the deficiency. 

An amusing instance of wrong emphasis 
in reading the Scriptures was thus given 
in a recent number of ' The Reader \ " A 
6 clergyman, in the course of the church 
i service, coming to verses 24 and 25 of 
' 1 Sam. xxviii, which describe how Saul, 
'who had been abstaining from food in 
'the depth of his grief, was at last 
c persuaded to eat, read them thus : * And 
£ c the woman had a fat calf in the house ; 
c ' and she hasted, and killed it, and took 
' ' flour, and kneaded it, and did bake 
4 c unleavened bread thereof : and she 
' c brought it before Saul, and before his 
c i servants ; and they did eat ' ". 

Continuing my review of your essay, 
I notice that it is said of a traveller on 
the Queen's highway, "He bowls along 
" it with ease in a vehicle which a few 
" centuries ago would have been broken 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 29 

c< to pieces in a deep rut, or come to grief 
"in a bottomless swamp." There being 
here no words immediately before " come", 
to indicate in what tense that verb is, I 
have to turn back to find the tense, and 
am obliged to read the sentence thus, 
" would have bee?i broken to pieces in a # 
" deep rut, or (would have been) come to 
u grief in a bottomless swamp " ; for, a part 
of a complex tense means nothing with- 
out the rest of the tense ; therefore, the 
rest of the tense ought always to be found 
in the sentence. Nor is it allowable, as 
in your sentence, to take part of the tense 
of a passive verb to eke out the meaning 
of an active verb given without any tense 
whatever. 

Further on, I find you speaking of The source 

of mistakes. 

" that fertile source of mistakes among 
" our clergy, the mispronunciation of 
M Scripture proper names ". It is not 
the " mispronunciation of Scripture pro- 
** per names " which is the source of mis- 
takes ; the mispronunciation of Scripture 
proper names constitutes the mistakes 
themselves of which you are speaking; 



30 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



Pronuncia- 
tion of 
Greek 
proper 
names. 



Should the 
"A" in 
'* humble " 
be aspi- 
rated ? 



and a thing cannot at the same time be 
a source, and that which flows from it. It 
appears that what you intended to speak 
of was "that fertile source of mistakes 
" among our clergy, their ignorance of 
" Scripture proper names, the mispronun- 
" ciation of which is quite inexcusable." 

Speaking on this subject, I may re- 
mark that, as you so strongly advocate 
our following the Greeks in the pro- 
nunciation of their proper names, I hope 
you will be consistent and never again 
in reading the Lessons, call those ancient 
cities Samaria and Philadelphia otherwise 
than Samaria and Philadelphia. 

I was much amused by your attempt 
to set up the Church ' Prayer Book ' as 
an authority for the aspiration of the 
u h" in the word "humble"; when, on 
the first page of the c Morning Prayer? 
we are exhorted to confess our sins " with 
" an humble, lowly, penitent, and obedient 
"heart". As for the argument which 
you base upon the alliterative style of the 
^Prayer Booh''; that argument proves 
too much, to be in your favour; for if, 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 31 

because we find the words " humble " and 
"hearty" following each other, we are 
therefore to believe that it was the in- 
tention of the compilers of our beautiful 
ritual that we should aspirate the " h " in 
" humble ", as in " hearty "/ what was the 
intention of the compilers when, in the 
supplication for the Queen, they required 
us to pray that we " may faithfully serve, 
" honour, and humbly obey her " ? 

Towards the end of your essay you say, " odious" 
"Entail is another poor injured verb. " odor ou3." 
" Nothing ever leads to anything as a 
u consequence, or brings it about, but it 
" always entails it. This smells strong of 
"the lawyer's clerk". It was a very 
proper expression which Horace made use 
of when, speaking of over-laboured com- 
positions, he said that they smelt of the 
lamp ; but it is scarcely a fit expression 
which you employ, when, speaking of a 
certain word, you say, this smells strong 
of the lawyer's clerk. Lawyers or their 
clerks may be odiotts to you, but that does 
not give you the right to use an expression 
which implies that they are odorous. 



32 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



a whofar's ^ US ^ aS We ma Y ^nOW ^7 tne Wa Y m 

oT/rtSe which a man deals with the small trials 
anguage. ^ y^ how far he has attained a mastery 
over himself; so may we know by the 
way in which a writer deals with the 
small parts of speech, how far he has at- 
tained a mastery over the language. Let 
us see therefore how you manage the 
pronouns. 
Pronouns. I begin by noticing a remark which, in 
your letter to me, has reference to this 
part of the subject. You say, respecting 
my criticism on your essay, " Set to work 
46 in the same way with our English ver- 
11 sion of the Bible, and what work you 
" would make of it " ! To this I reply : 
Our English version of the Bible is ac- 
knowledged to be, on the whole, excellent, 
whether considered with respect to its 
faithfulness to the originals, or with re- 
spect to its purity and elegance of lan- 
guage. Its doctrines being divine, are, 
like their Author, perfect ; but the trans- 
lation, being human, is frequently obscure. 
You bid me look at the " he " and " him " 
in Luke xix, 3, 4, 5. You surely do not 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 83 

defend the construction of these sentences ? 
See what Dr. Campbell says on this sub- 
ject, in his 'Philosophy of Rhetoric \ 
book ii. chap. 6. " It is easy to conceive 
" that, in numberless instances, the pro- 
noun ' he ' will be ambiguous, when two 
" or more males happen to be mentioned 
M in the same clause of a sentence. In 
" such a case we ought always either to 
" give another turn to the expression, or 
"to use the noun itself, and not the pro- 
f noun ; for when the repetition of a word 
"is necessary it is not offensive. The 
u translators of the Bible have often ju- 
" diciously used this method ; I say 
"judiciously, because, though the other 
" method is on some occasions preferable, 
u yet by attempting the other, they would 
" have run a much greater risk of destroy- 
" ing that beautiful simplicity which is an 
"eminent characteristic of Holy Writ. 
" I shall take an instance from the speech 
" of Judah to his brother Joseph in 
" Egypt- c We said to my lord, The lad 
" ' cannot leave his father, for if he should 

D 



34 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" ' leave his father, his father would die.' 
" Gen. xliv, 22. The words i his father ' 
" are, in this short verse, thrice repeated, 
u and yet are not disagreeable, as they 
" contribute to perspicuity. Had the 
"last part of the sentence run thus, 
" ' if he should leave his father he 
" ' would die ', it would not have ap- 
peared from the expression, whether 
" it were the child or the parent that 
" would die ". 

Misuse of ATi 

pronouns. A little attention to this matter would 
have saved you from publishing such a 
paragraph as the following; — " Two other 
" words occur to me which are very com- 
" monly mangled by our clergy. One of 
" these is c covetous ' and its substantive 
" ' covetousness '. I hope some who read 
" these lines will be induced to leave off 
" pronouncing them i covetious ? and \ cove- 
" c tiousness f. I can assure them that 
" when they do thus call them^ one at 
"least of their hearers has his appre- 
" ciation of their teaching disturbed ".* 

* The italics are not the Dean's. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. S5 

You have so confusedly used your pro- 
nouns in the above paragraph, that it 
may be construed in ten thousand different 
ways. 

In some sentences your pronouns have Nouns * 
actually no nouns to which they apply. 
For example, on page 192, " That nation ". 
What nation ? You have not spoken of 
any nation whatever. You have spoken 
of "the national mind", "the national 
" speech ", and " national simplicity ", 
things pertaining to a nation, but have 
not spoken of a nation itself. So also, on 
page 195, "a journal published by these 
" people ". By what people ? Where is 
the noun to which this relative pro- 
noun refers? In your head it may 
have been, but it certainly is not in 
your essay. 

The relation between nouns and pro- 
nouns is a great stumbling-block to most 
writers. The following sentence occurs in 
Hallam's 4 Literature of Europe ' ; — " No 
" one as yet had exhibited the structure of 
"the human kidneys, Vesalius having 

D 2 



36 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" only examined them in dogs ". Human 
kidneys in dogs ! * 

In a memoir of John Leyden, the 
shepherd boy, in ' Small Beginnings ; or, 
'the Way to Get On\ there is, on page 
104, the following passage: — "The Pro- 
cessor soon perceived, however, that the 
" intellectual qualities of the youth were 
" superior to those of his raiment ". 
Intellectual qualities of r&iment ! 
a pronoun In your essay, on page 196, you say, " I 

too widely 

separated " have known cases where it has been 
" thoroughly eradicated ". il When I hear 
" a man gets to his its ", says Wm. Cob- 
bett, "I tremble for him". ISTow just 
read backwards with me, and let us see 
how many singular neuter nouns inter- 
vene before we come to the one to which 
your pronoun " it " belongs. " A tipple ", 
" a storm ", " the charitable explanation ", 
" the well-known infirmity ", " the way ", 
" ale ", " an apology ", " the consterna- 
" tion ", " their appearance ", " dinner ", 
"the house", "the following incident", 

* Breeds ' Modem English Literature \ 



from its 
noun, 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH 37 

"his ed", "a neighbouring table", "a 
" South-Eastern train ", " a Great West- 
" ern ", " Reading ", " a refreshment- 
" room ", " the Aatmosphere ", " the hair ", 
iC the air ", " the cholera " 3 " his opinion ", 
" this vulgarism ", " energy ", " self-re- 
" spect ", " perception ", " intelligence ", 
" habit ". Here we have it at last. Only 
twenty-eight nouns intervening between 
the pronoun " it ", and the noun " habit " 
to which it refers ! I could give addi- 
tional examples from your essay, but 
surely this is enough, to show that the 
schoolmaster is needed by other people 
besides the Directors of the Great Western 
and South-Eastern railways. 

One word in conclusion. You make 
the assertion that the possessive pronoun 
"its" "never occurs in the English ver- 
" sion of the Bible ". It is to be regretted 
that you have spoken so positively on 
this subject. Probably the knowledge of 
our translators' faithfulness to the original 
text, and the fact of there being in 
Hebrew no neuter, may have led you 



THE BEAN' 8 ENGLISH. 

and others into this error; "but look at 
Leviticus xxv, 5, "That which groweth 
" of its own accord ", and you will see that 
" its ", the possessive of " it ", does occur 
" in the English version of the Bible ". 

I am, Rev. Sir, 

Yours most respectfully, 

G. WASHINGTON MOON. 

London^ April 1863 



THE DEAFS ENGLISH. 



CRITICISM No. II; 

In Reply to the Dean of Cantekbury^ 
Rejoindek. 

What ! is it possible that the Dean of £ 
Canterbury can have so forgotten the 
Scriptural precept " Be courteous ", as to 
speak, in a public meeting, in such a 
manner about an absent antagonist, that 
the language is condemned by the assem- 
bly, and the Dean is censured by the 
public press ? Your own county paper, 
Reverend Sir, Q The South-Eastern Gazette? 
in giving a report of your second lecture* 
in St. George's Hall, Canterbury, makes 
the following observations : u Mr. G. W. 

* Subsequently published in < Good Words \ 
June, 1863. 



Be cour- 
teous." 



40 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" Moon issued a pamphlet controverting 
cc many of the points advanced by the 
"Dean, and showing that the reverend 
"gentleman himself had been guilty of 
"the very violations of good English 
" which he had so strongly condemned in 
" others. The greater portion of the 
" Dean's lecture on Monday evening was 
" devoted to an examination of the state- 
"ments made by Mr. Moon, and to a 
" defence of the language employed by 
" the Dean in his former lecture. Opin- 
ions differ as to the success of the 
"reverend gentleman, many of his posi- 
" tions being called in question ; while 
"the epithets which he did not hesitate 
"to use in speaking of an antagonist 
" possessing some acquaintance with the 
" English language, w r ere generally con- 
" demned. These might and ought to 
" have been avoided, especially by one 
" whose precepts and example have their 
" influence, for good or for harm, upon 
"the society in which he moves. c Get 
" 'wisdom, get understanding, and forget it 
"'not'*, is a text that even the Dean of 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 41 

"Canterbury might ponder over with 
" advantage ". 

What, too, is to be said of that language " Idiots -" 
which, even in your calmer moments, 
you have not scrupled to apply to me? 
You had, in your former essay,* worded 
a sentence so strangely, that it suggested 
a meaning perfectly ludicrous. I called 
your attention to this, first in a private 
letter, and afterwards in a pamphlet,f 
and, in your c Plea for the Queen's Eng- 
' lish, No. II \ you indignantly exclaim, 
in reference to my remarks, " We do not 
" write for Idiots '\ Thank you for your 
politeness ; I can make all excuses for 
hasty words spoken in unguarded mo- 
ments; but when a gentleman deliber- 
ately uses such expressions in prints he 
shows, by his complacent self-sufficiency, 
how much need he has to remember that 
it is possible to be worse than even an 
idiot. " Seest thou a man wise in his own 

* l A Plea for the Queen's English'. — l Good 
'Words', March, 1863. 

f The previous letter is a re-publication of that 
pamphlet. 



42 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

<c conceit ? there is more hope of a fool 
"than of him". Prov. xxvi, 12. 
"A most Continuing your remarks on my criti- 

abnormal ° <? * 

ofthe auri- c i sm s, you say, " It must require, to speak 
dagTsf" pen * " in the genteel language which some of 
" my correspondents uphold, a most abnor- 
" mal elongation of the auricular appen- 
" dages, for a reader to have suggested to 
u his mind a fall from the sublime height 
" of ignorance down into the depth of a 
"mistake." I spoke of editors falling 
into mistakes : it remained for the Dean 
of Canterbury to add, that they fell doicn 
into the depth of a mistake. You say you 
do not write for idiots ; who else would 
imagine that it were possible to fall up 
into a depth ? Reverting to your expres- 
sion, "abnormal elongation ofthe auricidar 
" appendages ", — you recommended us, in 
your former essay, to use plainness of 
language, and when we mean a spade, to 
say so, and not call it " a well-known ob- 
" long instrument of manual husbandry ". 
I wonder you did not follow your own 
teaching, and, in plain language, call me 
an ass ; but I suppose you considered the 



THE BEAN'S ENGLISH. 43 

language plain enough, and certainly it is : 
there can be no doubt as to your meaning. 
I must leave it to the public to decide 
whether I have deserved such a distin- 
guished title. Recipients of honours do 
not generally trouble themselves about 
merit ; but, as I am very jealous for the 
character of him who has thus flatteringly 
distinguished me; and as some captious 
persons may call in question his right to 
confer the title of ass ; I shall endeavour, 
in the following pages, to silence for ever 
all cavillers, and to prove, to demonstra- 
tion, that he did not give away that 
which did not belong to him. 

Of my former letter, you say that, " No case : 

abuse the 

when you first looked it through, it re- plaintiff." 
minded you of the old story of the attor- 
ney's endorsement of the brief,— "No 
"case: abuse the Plaintiff": for, the 
objections brought by me against the 
matter of your essay, are very few 
and by no means weighty ; as L have 
spent almost all my labour in criticisms 
on your style and sentences. Precisely! 
I wished to show, by your own writings, 



44 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

that so far were you from being competent 
to teach others English composition, that 
you had need yourself to study its first prin- 
ciples ; but there is no abuse whatever in 
that letter : you had no precedent in my 
remarks for your language ; and as for my 
having made but few objections to your 
essay, I will at once give you convincing 
proof that it was not because I had no 
more objections to make. 

I had written the following paragraph 
before your second essay was published ; 
and although, in that essay, you defend 
the statement you had previously made, I 
conceive that you have not by any means 
established your position. 
How the cat I venture to assert that, what we say 

jumps. ? J 

figuratively of some not over-wise people, 
we may say literally of you, — " You do 
" not know how the cat jumps " ; for, 
what do you tell us ? You tell us that it 
is wrong to say, " The cat jumped on to the 
" chair ", the " to ", you remark, " being 
" wholly unneeded and never used by any 
" careful writer or speaker." With all due 
deference to such a high authority on such 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 45 

a very important matter, I beg leave to 
observe that, when we say, " The cat 
"jumped on to the chair ", we mean that 
the cat jumped from somewhere else to 
the chair, and alighted on it ; but when 
we say, 4i The cat jumped on the chair", 
we mean that the cat was on the chair 
already, and that, while there, she jumped. 
The circumstances are entirely different ; 
and according to the difference in the 
circumstances, so should there be a dif- 
ference in the language used to describe 
them respectively. It is evident that in 
watching the antics of puss, you received 
an impulse from her movements, and you 
yourself jumped — to a icrong conclusion.* 

* The ''Edinburgh Review \ after objecting to 
some of my remarks as hypercritical, says, "It is not 
" meant that all Mr. Moon's comments are of this 
" kind. The Dean's style is neither particularly ele- 
" gant nor correct, and his adversary sometimes hits 
" him hard ; besides in one or two cases successfully 
"disputing his judgments. On the important ques- 
tion (for instance) whether we should say the cat 
"jumped ' on to the chair', or ' on the chair', we 
" must vote against the Dean, who unjustly condemns 
" the former expression." 



46 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



" Honor ", 
44 favor", &c. 



Again, you say, " I pass on now to 
6 spelling, on which I have one or two 
'remarks to make. The first shall be, 
4 on the trick now so universal " [ 4 so uni- 
versal ' ! as if universality admitted of 
comparison] " across the Atlantic, and be- 
4 coming in some quarters common among 
4 us in England, of leaving out the 4 u ' in 

the termination l our'; writing honor, 
1 favor, neighbor, Savior, <Sbc. ]STow the ob- 
jection to this is not only that it makes 
4 very ugly words, totally unlike anything 
4 in the English language before, but that 
4 it obliterates all trace of the derivation 
4 and history of the word." * * * * " The 
4 late Archdeacon Hare, in an article on 
4 English orthography in the i Philological 
4 4 Museum ', some years ago, expressed a 
4 hope that * such abominations as honor 
4 4 and favor would henceforth be confined 
' 4 to the cards of the great vulgar.' There 
4 we still see them, and in books printed 
4 in America ; and while we are quite 
4 contented to leave our fashionable friends 
4 in such company, I hope we may none 
4 of us be tempted to join it." I will tell 






THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 47 

you where else these " abominations " may- 
be found, besides being found u on the 
" cards of the great vulgar ". They may 
be found in a volume of poems by Henry 
Alford, Dean of Canterbury ; a volume 
published, not in America, but in this 
country, by Rivingtons of Pall Mall. 
The following is a specimen taken from 
his u Recent Poems ". Two verses will 
suffice. 

RECENT POEMS. 

A WISH. 

u Would it were mine, amidst the changes 
" Through which our varied lifetime ranges, 
" To live on Providence's bounty 
" Down in some favored western county. 



" There may I dwell with those who love me ; 
" And when the earth shall close above me, 
" My memory leave a lasting savor 
" Of grace divine, and human favor." 

It is true that there is a preface to the 
volume, and that it accounts for the spell- 
ing of such words, by informing us that 
many of the poems have been published 



48 THE LEAN'S ENGLISH. 

in America ; but that is no justification of 
your retaining the Transatlantic spelling 
which you condemn. I guess you do not 
mean to imply that it is with poems as 
with people, — £.6., that a temporary resi- 
dence abroad occasions them to acquire 
habits of pronunciation, &c., not easily 
thrown off on a return to the mother 
country : and yet, if this be not what the 
preface means ; pray, what does it mean ? 
Perhaps, as mountain travellers brand cer- 
tain words on their alpenstocks, to show 
the height that has been attained by those 
using them, so you have thought well to 
favor us with this savor of Americanisms, 
to show us that your poems have had the 
honor of being republished on the other 
side of the Atlantic. 

It appears to me that the preface serves 
only to make matters worse ; for it shows 
that the objectionable form of orthography 
is retained with your knowledge and your 
sanction, for I have quoted from the 
" Third Edition." How is this ? You 
say that the spelling in question should 
be confined to the cards of " the great 



THE BEAN'S ENGLISH. 49 

" vulgar "/ and yoic yourself adopt that 
very spelling ! 
Before quitting the subject of the spell- " T J e ^ r "„ 

u ° J r and "bass". 

ing of words of the above class, I beg 
leave to say that although there are, in our 
language, certain words ending in u oar ", 
which, as we have seen, are sometimes 
spelt with " or " only ; as honor, favor, 
&c, without interference with the sense, 
honor being still the same as honour, and 
favor the same as favoz^r; there is one 
word of this class, the meaning of which 
changes with the change of spelling ; 
namely, the word tenour, which, with the 
" u ", means continuity of state ; as in 
' Gray's JSlegy\ — 

" Along the cool sequestered vale of life 

" They kept the noiseless tenour of their way :" 

but without the u ic", signifies a certain 
clef in music. This distinction has been 
very properly noticed by Dr. Nugent in 
his ' English and French Dictionary \' 
there the word stands thus : — 

" Tenor, alto, m. 

u Tenour, maniere, f." 



50 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

but you, after lecturing us upon the im- 
propriety of leaving out the "«*" in 
" honour ", and in "favour ", although the 
omission in these words makes no altera- 
tion in the sense, yourself leave the " u " 
out of "tenour", and speak, on page 429, 
of the " tenor " of your essay ! If this be 
not straining at gnats and swallowing a 
camel, I do not know what is. What 
with the tenor of your essay, and the bass, 
or baseness, of your English, you certainly 
are fiddling for us a pretty tune. It 
is to be hoped that if we do not dance 
quite correctly, to your new music, you 
will take into consideration the extreme 
difficulty we have to understand the con- 
tradictory instructions we have received. 
Open up". Again, you censure the editors of news- 
papers for using the expression " open up ", 
and you say, " what it means more than 
" open would mean, I never could dis- 
" cover ". Permit me to say that, if you 
look at home, you will find in your own 
periodical, in the identical number of it 
containing this remark of yours, two 
Doctors of Divinity using the very ex- 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 51 

pression you condemn ; a third Doctor of 
Divinity using an expression very similar ; 
and a fourth, yourself, using an expression 
which, under the circumstances, is deserv- 
ing of severe censure. To begin with the 
Editor ; the Rev. Norman Macleod, d.d., 
says, on page 204, " He opens up in the 
" parched desert a well that refreshes us ". 
The Rev. John Caird, d.d., says, on page 
2 37, " Now these considerations may open 
" up to us one view of the expediency of 
11 Christ's departure ". The Rev. Thomas 
Guthrie, d.d., says, on page 163, "the 
" past, with its sin and folly, rose up before 
"his eyes". I suppose you would say ? 
" What rose up means more than rose would 
" mean I cannot discover". Probably not, 
but just tell us what you mean by saying, 
on page 197, "Even so the language grew "Grew up" 
" up ; its nerve, and vigour, and honesty, 
" and toil, mainly brought down to us in 
"native Saxon terms". If the word up 
be redundant in the quoted sentences of 
the other learned Doctors, what shall we 
say of it in your own ? In their expres- 
sions there is sense ; so, too, is there in 

e 2 



52 THE BEAN'S ENGLISH. 

your expression ; but it is a kind of sense 
best described by the word nonsense. The 
language grew up by being brought down! 
Sure, it must have been the Irish language 
that your honour was spaking of. 
the g stud° f of N° w for your reply to rny letter. In 
Enghsii. condemnation of your wretched English, 
I had cited some of the highest authori- 
ties ;* and you coolly say, " I must freely 
" acknowledge to Mr. Moon, that not one 
" of the gentlemen whom he has named 
" has ever been my guide, in whatever 
" study of the English language I may 
"have accomplished, or in what little I 
" may have ventured to write in that lan- 
"guage". "I have a very strong per- 
" suasion that common sense, ordinary 
" observation, and the prevailing usage of 
"the English people, are quite as good 
" guides in the matter of the arrangement 
" of sentences, as [are] the rules laid down 
< c by rhetoricians and grammarians." Thus 
we come to the actual truth of the matter. 
It appears that you really have never 

* Dr. Campbell, Lord Karnes, Hugh Blair, Lindley 
Murray, and others. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 53 

made the English language your study ! 

All that you know about it is what you 

have picked up by " ordinary observa- 

u tion " ;* and the result is, that you 

tell us it ^correct to say, "He is^me?\ T 

M wiser than/me "yf and that you speak 

of u a decided weak point" in a man's ^ e A ak decided 

character! You must have a decidedly pomt ' 

weak ]3oint in your own character, to set 

up yourself as a teacher of the English 

language, when the only credentials of 

qualification that you can produce are 

such sentences as these. 

You sneer at " Americanisms ", but you 
would never find an educated American 
who would venture to say, "It is me", 
for "It is I"; or, " It is Aim", for "It 
" is he" ; or, " different to ", for M different 
" from ". And nowhere are the use and the 

* "It is notorious that at our public schools 
" every boy has been left to pick up his English 
" where and how he could." — Harrison ' On the 
1 English Language \ preface, p. v. 

f This subject was ably commented on by a writer 
in the * English Churchman\ and by a writer in 
the ' Glasgow Christian News \ See Appendix. 



54 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

omission of the "h" as an aspirate, so clearly 
distinguished as in the United States.* 
ruieof°aii With regard to the purport of your 
second essay on the Queen's English, 
it is, as I expected it would be, chiefly a 
condemnation of my former letter ; but 
you very carefully avoid those particular 
errors which I exposed ; such as, " Some- 
" times the editors of our papers fall, from 
" their ignorance, into absurd mistakes"; 
and, a A man does not lose his mother now 
" in the papers ". There are, however, in 
your second essay, some very strange speci- 
mens of Queen's English. You say, " The 
" one rule of all others, which he cites ". 
Now as, in defence of your particular 
views, you appeal so largely to common 
sense, let me ask, in the name of that 
common sense, How can one thing be 
another thing ? How can one rule be of all 
other rules the one which I cite ? If this 
be Queen's English, you may well say of 
the authorities I quoted, " There are more 

* See * Lectures on the English Language ', by 
George P. Marsh, Minister of the United States at 
the court of the King of Italy. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 55 

*■* things in the English language than 
14 seem to have been dreamt of in their 
" philosophy "; for I am quite sure that 
they never dreamt of any such absurdi- 
ties. 

In my former letter I drew attention c |?senhan 
to your misplacing of adverbs; and now us 
you appear to be trying, in some instances, 
to get over the difficulty by altogether 
omitting the adverbs, and supplying their 
places by adjectives ; and this is not a 
new error with you. You had previously 
said, " If with your inferiors, speak no 
w coarser than usual ; if with your superiors, 
" no finer" We may correctly say, " a 
" certain person speaks coarsely "/ but it 
is absurdly ungrammatical to say, " he 
" speaks coarse"! In your second essay, 
you say, " the words nearest connected ", 
instead of, "the words most nearly con- . 
"nected"; but this will never do; the 
former error, that of position, was bad 
enough, it was one of syntax ; the latter 
error, that of substituting one part of 

speech for another, is still worse. I have Adjectives 

and ad- 
spoken of your " decided weak poi?it" ; I verbs. 



66 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

will now give another example, a very 
remarkable one, for it is an example of 
rising an adjective instead of an adverb, 
in a sentence in which you are speaking of 
using an adverb instead of an adjective. 
You say, "The fact seems to be, that in 
"this case I was using the verb 'read' in 
" a colloquial and scarcely legitimate sense, 
" and that the adverb seems necessary, 
" because the verb is not a strict neuter- 
M substantive." We may properly speak 
of a word being not strictly a neuter-sub- 
stantive; but we cannot properly speak 
of a substantive being " strict ". So much 
for the grammar of the sentence ; now for 
its meaning. Tour sentence is an expla- 
nation of your use of the word "oddly", 
in the phrase, " would read rather oddly"; 
and oddly enough you have explained it ; 
"would read" is the conditional form of 
the verb ; and how can that ever be either 
a neuter-substantive, or a substantive of any 
other hind ? 

In your former essay you prepared us 
to expect many strange things ; I suppose 
we are to receive this as one of them. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 61 

You told us, u Plenty more might be said 
" about grammar ; plenty that would 
" astonish some teachers of it. I may 
" say something of this another time." 
Take all the credit you like; you have 
well earned it ; for you have more than 
redeemed your promise ; you have aston- 
ished other people beside teachers of 
grammar. 

Again, you say, " The whole number is one"™' 
" divided into two classes : the first class 
" and the last class. To the former of 
" these belong three : to the latter, one ". 
That is, " To the former of these belong 
u three ; to the latter [belong] one " ; one 
belong ! When, in the latter part of a 
compound sentence, we change the nomi- 
native, we must likewise change the verb, 
that it may agree with its nominative. 
The error is repeated in the very next sen- 
tence. You say, " There are three that are 
" ranged under the description c first ' : and 
" one that is ranged under the description 
" ' last V That is, " There are three that 
" are ranged under the description 4 first ' ; 
" and [there are\ one that is ranged under 



bb THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" the description c last'." There are one ! 
The sentence cannot be correctly analysed 
in any other way. It is true we understand 
what you mean; just as we understand 
the meaning of the childish prattle of our 
little ones ; but, because your sentence 
is not unintelligible, it is not, on that 
account the less incorrect. It appears 
to me that, before you have finished a 
sentence, you have forgotten how you 
began it. Here is another instance. You 
say, " We call a 4 cup-board ' a c cubbard ', 
" a ' half-penny ', a 6 haepenny ', and so of 
u many other compound words ". Had 
you begun your sentence thus, We speak of 
a " cup-board " as a u cubbard ", of a 
" half-penny " as a " haepenny " it w^ould 
have been correct to say, " and so o/many 
" other compound words " ; because the 
clause would mean, " and so [we speak] 
" of many other compound words " ; but 
having begun the sentence with, " We 
u call " it is sheer nonsense to finish it 
with, a and so of" ; for it is saying, cc and 
" so [we call] of many other compound 
a words". 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 59 

Elsewhere you say, " Call a spade ' a 
" 4 spade ', not an oblong instrument of 
" manual husbandry ; let home be 'home', 
" not a residence ; a place a 6 place ', not a 
" locality ; and so of the rest." What is 
your meaning in this last clause ? The 
sentence is undoubtedly faulty, whether 
the words "and so of" are considered in 
connexion with the first clause, or in con- 
nexion with the following one. In the 
former case we must say, " and [speak] so 
" of the rest "; and in the latter case we 
must say, " and [let us speak] so of the 
"rest". In neither case can we use the 
word " call ", with which you have begun 
your sentence. 

Here is another specimen of your ^v^rou- * 
'Queen's English', or rather of the Dean's ™lv\ y ' 
English ; a specimen* in which the verbs, 
past and present, are in a most delightful 
state of confusion. Ton are speaking of 
your previous essay, and of the reasons 
you had for writing it ; and you say, " If 
"I had believed the Queen's English to 
" have been rightly laid down by the dic- 
" tionaries and the professors of rhetoric, I 



60 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

a need not have troubled myself to write 
" about it. It was exactly because I did 
cc not believe this, but found both of them 
" in many cases going astray, that I ven- 
" tured to put in my plea." 

Now, "I need not " is present, not past ; 
and it is of the past you are speaking ; you 
should therefore have said, "I needed not ", 
or, " I should not have needed ". And the 
verb " troubled ", which you have put in 
the past, should have been in the present ; 
just as the verb " need " which you have 
put in the present should have been in the 
past ; for you were not speaking of what 
you would not have needed to have done, 
but of what you would not have needed to 
do. The sentence, then, should have been, 
u If I had believed so-and-so, I should not 
" have needed to trouble myself ". 
professors I may notice also that, in the above 

walking off 

with the sentence, you speak of rules laid down 

dictionaries. 7 ** x 

by the " dictionaries ", and the "pro- 
u fessors of rhetoric "/ thus substituting, 
in one case, the works for the men; 
and, in the other case, speaking of the 
men themselves. Why not either speak 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 61 

of the " compilers of dictionaries", and the 
"professors of rhetoric"; or else speak of 
the a dictionaries", and the " treatises on 
" rhetoric" ? Write either figuratively or 
literally, whichever you please ; or write 
in each style, by turns, if you like ; for, 
variety in a series of sentences, where 
there is uniformity in each, is a beauty ; 
but variety in a single sentence is merely 
confusion: witness the following extract 
from Gilfillan's 'Literary Portraits^: — 
"Channing's mind was planted as thick 
"with thoughts as a backwood of his 
"own magnificent land." A backwood 
planted with thoughts ! What a glorious 
harvest for the writers of America! 
says Breen. However, I must not enter 
upon the subject of style, lest I should 
extend this letter to a wearisome length. 
Suffice it to say, you do not mean that 
you found the professors of rhetoric 
walking off with the books; though you 
do tell us you "found both of the7?i" 
(the dictionaries and the professors of 
rhetoric) " in many cases going astray ". 

Continuing my review, I have to notice tyofhim". 



62 THE BEAN'S ENGLISH. 

that you say, " His difficulty (and I men- 
" tion it because it may be that of many 
" others besides him) is that he has missed 
" the peculiar sense of the preposition by 
" as here used." Your difficulty seems 
to be, that you have missed seeing the 
'peculiar sense (nonse?ise) of your own ex- 
pressions. Tou tell us that you men- 
tion your correspondent's difficulty, be- 
cause it may be a difficulty of many 
other people, besides being a difficulty of 
him ! 
and future* Finally, as regards my criticisms on 

of verbs. , mi 

your grammar ; you say, I he next 
" point which I notice shall be the use of 
" the auxiliaries c shall ' and c will \ Now 
'■ here we are at once struck by a curious 
" phenomenon." We certainly are ; — 
the phenomenon of a gentleman setting 
himself up to lecture on the use of verbs, 
and publicly proclaiming his unfitness for 
the task by confusing the present and the 
future in the very first sentence he utters 
on the subject. 
»to V ro- Speaking of the verb "to progress", 
gress " you say, "The present usage makes the 



TEE DMdJUrS EXGLISH. 63 

" verb neuter", and, "We seem to want 
" it ; and if we do, and it does not violate 
" any known law of formation, by all 
"means let us have it. True, it is the 
'" first of its own family ; we have not 
" yet formed aggress, regress, &c, into 
11 verbs." If you will allow me to digress 
from the consideration of your grammar 
to the consideration of your accuracy, I 
will show that you transgress in making 
this statement. In the folio edition of 
Bailey's ' Universal Dictionary^ \ published 
in 1755, I find the very verbs, " to ag- 
" gress" and "to regress", which you, in 
1863, say "ice have not yet formed". In 
the same dictionary there is also the verb 
"to progress " ; and it is given as a verb 
neuter, So that what you call " the pre- 
" sent usage " is, clearly, the usage of the 
past y the verb which you say is " the first 
" of its own family ", is nothing of the 
sort ; " to aggress " and " to regress ", which 
you say "we have not yet formed", are 
found in a dictionary published in 1755; 
and the neuter verb which you say " we 
" seem to want ", we have had in use more 



64 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

than one hundred years! Nor are the 
verbs aggress and regress mere " dictionary 
"words without any authority for their use". 
The former is used by Prior in his ' Ode to 
'Queen Anne'; and the latter is used 
by Sir Thomas Browne in his ' Vulgar 
4 Errors \* 

I will briefly notice a few of your 
numerous errors in syntax, &c., and then 
pass on to weightier matters. You speak 

^Precluded f a possibility being "precluded in " the 
mind. You tell us of " a more neat way 

ingl p s r en-" " °f expressing what would be Mr. Moon's 
" sentence ". We express a meaning, or we 
write a sentence ; but we do not express a 
sentence. The word seems to be rather a 
pet of yours; you speak on page 198, 

Expressing f expressing a woman! c Queer Eng- 
' lish ' would not have been an inappro- 
priate title to your essays. Then we 

*MCn respect h ave « [ n respect of ", for " with respect 

* For an account of the origin and gradual develop- 
ment of the words " progress ", " digress ", " egress ", 
" regress ", and " transgress " see an interesting 
little book, called ' English Roots \ by A. J. Knapp, 
p. 135. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 65 

" to "/* and " an exception, which I cannot ^ception an 
M well treat ", instead of, " of which I can- 
"not well treat"; for it is evident from 
the context, that you were not speaking ot 
treating an exception, but of treating of an 
exception. 

The construction of some of your objection- 
able con- 
sentences is very objectionable: y ou sentences ° f 
" say, I have noticed the word c party ' 
"used for an individual, occurring 
"in Shakspeare" , instead of, "I have 
" noticed, in Shakspeare, the word ' party ' 
" used for an individual '\ But how is it 
that you call a man an individual? Xn^^ 11 ,?. 1 " 
your first essay on the Queen's English 
you said, " It is certainly curious enough 
" that the same debasing of our language 
" should choose, in order to avoid the 
" good honest Saxon ' man \ two words, 
" ' individual and 'party\ one of which ex- 
presses a man's unity, and the other 
" belongs to man associated" It certainly 

* This error is treated of at some length in 
'Lectures on the English Language ', by George P. 
Marsh, edited by Dr. William Smith, Classical Ex- 
aminer at the University of London, pp. 467-9. 

F 



66 THE BEAK'S ENGLISH. 

is curious ; but what appears to me to be 
more curious still, is that you, after writing 
that sentence, should yourself call a man 
" an individual "/ 
Again, I read, " The purpose is, to bring 
intopro- " the fact stated into prominence " : stated 

minence." . . . . 

into prominence! unquestionably, this 
should be, " to bring into prominence the 

The natural <« n . Qfnfpr -| 55 
order of con- 1<xclj ° wlta • 
structing a -,-, , . , . , , 

sentence. liven when writing on the proper con- 
struction of a sentence, you construct your 
own sentence so improperly that it fails 
to convey your meaning. You say, " The 
a natural order of constructing the sen- 
" tence would be to relate what happened 
" first, and my surprise at it afterwards ". 
Your sentence does not enlighten us on 
your views of the proper order in which 
the facts should be related; it tells us 
merely that we should relate w^hat first 
happened, and your subsequent surprise 
at it. Not one word about the order of 
relation. We are to relate what "happened 
u first " but we are not told what to relate 
first. You should have said, " The natural 
" order of constructing the sentence would 



cms associa- 
tion of 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 67 

< c be to relate first what happened, and 

"afterwards my surprise at it". You go 

on to tell us that we ought not " to mislead 

"the reader, by introducing the possibi- 

" lity of constructing the sentence other- 

" wise than as the writer intended ". 

How much easier it is to preach than to " con- 
struct" and 

practise! What do you wish us to un- Ucon9true "- 
derstand by readers " constructing " the 
sentence ? "Writers construct j readers 

COY) <ifr7/f> Incongru- 

consc? ue. ous ass ™.^ 

Lastly, on this part of the subject ; ideas! 
you say, "Mr. Moon quotes, with dis- 
" approbation, my words, where I join 
" together c would have been broken to 
" 4 pieces in a deep rut, or come to grief 
"4aa bottomless swamp '. He says this 
" can only be filled in thus, c would have 
w c been ' ", &c. I am quite sure that Mr. 
Moon never, after mentioning your sen- 
tence about "a deep rut " and "a bottomless 
"swamp", speaks of the sentence being 
"filled in "I That is the Dean of Canter- 
bury's style ; he gives a sentence about 
eating and being full, and then speaks of 
the sentence being u filled up "/ He speaks 

F 2 



C8 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

of people mending their ivays / and, in the 
very next paragraph, talks about the 
" Queen's highway " and " by-roads " and 
" private roads". He speaks of things 
"without life"; and immediately afterwards 
says he will introduce the body of — his essay. 

ESh\ You will, doubtless, gain great notoriety 
by your strange essays on the Queen's 
English ; for, in consequence of your in- 
accuracies in them, it will become usual to 
describe bad language as "Dean's English" '. 
By "bad language", I do not mean rude 
language ; I say nothing about that. I 
mean that, in consequence of your un- 
grammatical sentences, it will be as com- 
mon to call false English, " Dean's Eng- 
"lish'\ as it is to call base white metal, 
" German Silver" 

Eight-and- You say, "I have given a fair sample 

twenty . m . 

nouns be- " of the instances of ambiguity which Mr. 

tween a pro- 

£°™ andits "Moon c * tes out of my essay". A fair 
sample ! And yet you have made no 
mention of the instance of the eight- and- 
twenty nouns intervening between the 
pronoun "it" and the noun "habit", to 
which it refers. A fair sample ! And 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



69 



ffr* 

1 fcd 



yet you have made no mention of the f f v ^^^ 
instance of ambiguity in the paragraph 10,240 w- 

ferent read- 

about "covetous and covetousness ; a mgs. 
paragraph of less than ten lines, yet so 
ambiguously worded that you may ring 
as many changes on it as on a peal of 
bells ; only the melody would not be quite 
as sweet. However, if you do not object 
to a little bell-ringing, and if you will 
not think it sacrilegious of me to pull 
•the ropes, I will just see what kind of a 
peal of bells it is that you have hung 
in your belfry, for I call the paragraph, 
" the belfry ", and the pronouns, " the peal 
" of bells ", and these I name after the 
gamut, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, so we shall 
not have any difficulty in counting the 
changes. You say, "While treating of 
" the pronunciation of those who minister 
" in public, two other words occur to me 
" which are very commonly mangled by 

A 

u our clergy. One of these is 'covetous', 
"and its substantive ' covetousness '. I 
" hope some who read these lines^ will 
" be induced to leave off pronouncing 

B 

" them i covetious ' and c covetiousness '. I 



10 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

C D 

" can assure them that when they do thus 

E F 

" call them, one, at least, of their hearers 

G 

" has his appreciation of their teaching 
" disturbed ". I fancy that many a one 
who reads these lines will have his appre- 
ciation of your teaching disturbed, as far 
as it relates to the Queen's English. But 
now for the changes which may be rung 
on these bells, as I have called them. 
The first of them, "A", may apply either 
to "words", or to "our clergy". You 
say, " our clergy. One of these is c covet- 
" i ous ' ". I am sorry to say that the 
general belief is, there are more than one ; 
but perhaps you know one in particular. 
However, my remarks interrupt the bell- 
ringing, and we want to count the changes, 
so I will say no more, but will at once 
demonstrate that we can ring 10,240 
changes on your peal of bells ! In other 
words, that your paragraph, of less than 
ten lines, is so ambiguously worded, that, 
without any alteration of its grammar or 
syntax, it may be read in 10,240 different 
ways ! and only one of all that number shall 
be the right way to express your meaning 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



71 



ThePro- 
1 nouns. 


Nouns to which they may apply. 




No. of Different Readings. 


L 

B 

D 
E 
F 

G 


these 
them 
them 
they 
them 
their 

their 


words, or clergy 

words, clergy, readers, or lines 

words, clergy, readers, or lines 

words, clergy, readers, or lines 

words, clergy, readers, or lines 

words, clergy, readers, or lines 

j words, clergy, readers, lines, 
( or hearers .... 


2 
4 
4 
4 
4 
4 

5 


2 

these 4 X by the above 2= 8 
these 4 X by the above 8= 32 
these 4 X by the above 32= 128 
these 4 X by the above 128= 512 
these 4 X by the above 512= 2048 

these 5 X by the above 2048=10,240 



This is indeed a valuable addition to a literary 

curiosity. 

the curiosities of literature : a treasure 
" presented to the british nation by 
" the Very Rev. the Dean of Canter- 
" bury ". IsTo doubt it will be carefully 
preserved in the library of the British 
Museum. 

I have now, a serious charge to pre- The piay of 

° < x Hamlet 

fer against you; a charge to which I^^fe 
am reluctant to give a name. I will out ' 
therefore simply state the facts, and leave 
the public to give to your proceedings in 
this matter, whatever name they may 
think most fitting. You say, on page 
439, " I am reminded, in writing this, of a 
" criticism of Mr. Moon's on my remarks 



n THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" that we have dropped c thou ' and ' thee ' 
" in our addresses to our fellow-raen, and 
" reserved those words for our addresses 
" in prayer to Him who is the highest 
" personality. It will be hardly believed 
" that he professes to set this right by 
" giving his readers and me the information 
" that ' these pronouns are very extensively 
" ' and profusely ' (I used no such word) 
11 ' used in poetry, even (!) when inanimate 
" i objects are addressed ' : and thinks it 
" worth while to quote Coleridge's Address 
" to Mont Blanc to prove his point ! Really, 
" might not the very obvious notoriety of 
" the fact he adduces have suggested to 
" him that it was totally irrelevant to the 
" matter I was treating of?" Truly, this 
is the play of Hamlet with the ghost left 
out by special desire. Tour object was to 
controvert what I had advanced against 
your essay; and, I must say, that the 
means you have adopted to accomplish 
that end, are, to speak mildly, not much 
to your credit. I will prove what I say. 
The one word, against which the whole of 
my argument was directed, you have, in 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 73 

reproducing your sentence, omitted from 
the quotation / and then, of the mangled 
remains of the sentence, you exclaim, " It 
" will be hardly believed that he professes 
"• to set this right". I professed nothing 
of the sort ; you must know well, that my 
attack was against the one loord ichich you, 
have omitted. That this was the case, 
may clearly be seen on reference to my 
former letter,* where that word was, and 
still is, printed in italics, to draw special 
attention to it. You betray the weakness 
of your cause when you have recourse to 
such a suppression. 

Nor is the above instance of misquota- Misquota- 

x tion of an 

tion the only one in your essay. On page ^o r °£* nV * 
429, you put into my mouth words which 
I never uttered ; words which express a 
meaning totally at variance with what I 
said. You enclose the sentence in inverted 
commas to mark that it is a quotation; 
and, as if that were not enough, you preface 
that sentence with this doubly emphatic 
remark ; " these are his words not mine ". 
You then make me say that I hope " as I 
* Pa°;e T. 



U THE BEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" so strongly advocate our following the 
" Greeks in the pronunciation of their 
" proper names, I shall be consistent, and 
" never again, in reading the Lessons, call 
" those ancient cities Samaria and Phila- 
" delphia otherwise than Samaria and 
"Philadelphia" I never had any such 
thought, nor did I ever express any such 
wish. These words are not mine ; nor are 
they any more like mine, than I am like 
you. The original sentence, of which the 
above is a perversion, will be found on 
page 30 of my former letter. 
Misrepre- But the part of my letter which you 

sentations. 

most fully notice in your reply, is that 
which treats of the arrangement of sen- 
tences ; and, exactly as you suppress,_in 
the instance I have given, the one important 
word on which the whole of the argument 
turns ; so, in the matter of the arrangement 
of sentences, you suppress the one impor- 
tant paragraph which qualifies all the rest ! 
You privately draw the teeth of the lion 
and then publicly show how valiantly you 
can put your head into his mouth ; thus 
not only damaging your own character for 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 75 

honesty of representation, but also insult- 
ing the intelligence of the public, who 
you imagine can be deceived by such 
childish performances. The following are 
the facts of the case. You say, after 
mentioning the authorities I had named, 
"The one rule of all others" (!) "which 
u he " (Mr. Moon) " cites from these au- 
" thorities, and which he believes me to 
"have continually violated, is this: that 
" ' those parts of a sentence which are most 
" ' closely connected in their meaning ', should 
" ' be as closely as possible connected in 
" 'position \ Or, as he afterwards quotes 
" it from Dr. Blair, 'A capital rule in the 
" c arrangement of sentences is, that the 
" ' words or members most nearly related 
" c should be placed in the sentence as near 
" ' to each other as possible, so as to make 
" ' their mutual relation clearly appear ' ". 
You then go on to say, " Now doubtless 
" this rule is, in the main, and for general 
" guidance, a good and useful one ; indeed, 
" so plain to all, that it surely needed no 
"inculcating by these venerable writers. 
" But there are more things in the English 



V6 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" language than seem to have been dreamt 
u of in their philosophy. If this rule 
" were uniformly applied, it would break 
" down the force and the living interest of 
" style in any English writer, and reduce his 
" matter to a dreary and dull monotony ; 
" for it is in exceptions to its application 
" that almost all vigour and character of 
" style consist ". Would any person — 
could any person — in reading the above 
extract from your reply to my letter, ever 
imagine that that letter contains such a 
paragraph as the following ? I quote from 
page 26, where I say, " In contending for 
" the law of position, as laid down by Lord 
" Karnes, Dr. Campbell, and others, I do 
" so on the ground, that the observance of 
" this law contributes to that most essen- 
" tial quality in all writings — perspicuity ; 
" and although I would not, on any account, 
" wish to see all sentences constructed on 
"one uniform plan, I maintain that the 
" law of position must never be violated 
" when such violation would in any icay 
" obscure the meaning. Let your meaning 
" still be obvious, and you may vary your 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 11 

" mode of expression as you please, and your 
" language will be the richer for the varia- 
" tion. Let your meaning be obscure, and 
M no grace of diction, nor any music of a 
w well-turned period, will make amends to 
" your readers for their being liable to 
" misunderstand you ". The existence of . 
this paragraph, by which I so carefully 
qualify the reader's acceptance of Dr. 
Blair's law of position as a universal rule, 
you utterly ignore ; and, with the most 
strange injustice, you charge me, through 
sentence after sentence, and column after 
column, of your tedious essay, with main- 
taining that all expressions should be 
worded on one certain uniform plan. 
Sentences so arranged are, you say, accord- 
ing to "Mr. Moon's rule". Sentences 
differing from that arrangement are, you 
say, a violation of "Mr. Moon's rule". 
With as much reasonableness might you 
leave out the word " not ", from the ninth 
commandment, and assert that it teaches, 
" Thou shalt bear false witness against thy 
" neighbour." 
This being your method of conducting 



?8 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

a controversy, I assure you that, were you 
not the Dean of Canterbury, I would not 
answer your remarks. Doubtless, before 
the publication of this rejoinder,* many of 
the readers of your second essay will have 
noticed the significant circumstance, that 
of the various examples you give of sen- 
tences constructed on what you are pleased 
to call " Mr. Moon's rule ", but which, as I 
have shown, is only apart of " Mr. Moon's 
"rule", not one example is drawn from 
Mr. Moon's oion letter. 

You say, "But surely we have had 
" enough of Mr. Moon and his rules ". 
I do not doubt that you have ; but I must 
still detain you, as the Ancient Mariner 
detained the wedding-guest, until the tale 
is told. That being finished, I will let you 
go ; and I trust that like him, you will 
learn wisdom from the past : — 

" He went like one that hath been stunned, 

" And is of sense forlorn : 
" A sadder and a iviser man, 

" He rose the morrow morn." 

th e e intro-° With respect to the date of the intro- 
duction of . . . 
"its" into duction of the possessive pronoun "its . 

the Bible. l r 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 79 

which, you said, "never occurs in the 
" English version of the Bible " ; and 
which, as I showed you, occurs in Levit- 
icus, xxv. 5 ; you shelter yourself under 
the plea that you meant that the word 
never occurs in the " authorised edition ", 
known as " King James's Bible ". But, 
as you did not say either "authorised 
" edition " or " King Jameses Bible ", I am 
justified in saying that you have only 
yourself to blame for the consequences 
of having used language so unmistakably 
equivocal, as you certainly did when you 
said, " the English version of the Bible ", 
and did not mean the English version 
now in every one's hands, but meant a 
particular edition published 252 years 
ago. Speaking of my correction of your 
error, you say, " What is to be regretted 
" is, that a gentleman who is setting 
" another right with such a high hand, 
" should not have taken the pains to ex- 
" amine the English version as it really 
"stands, before printing such a sentence 
" as that which I have quoted ". I will 



80 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

show you that my examination of the 
subject has been sufficiently deep to dis- 
cover that yours must have been very 
superficial. Speaking of the word " its ", 
you say, "its apparent occurrence in the 
" place quoted is simply due to the King's 
" printers, who have modernised the pas- 
/ sage ". " Apparent occurrence " ! It is 
a real occurrence. Are we not to believe 
our eyes ? As for the " Xing'* s prin- 
" ters ", it was not they who introduced 
the word " its " into the English Bible. 
The first English Bible in which the word 
is found, is one that was printed at a time 
when there was no King on the English 
throne, consequently when there were no 
" Kintfs printers " : it was printed during 
the Commonwealth. Nor was that Bible 
printed by the "printers to the Parlia- 
" ment ". Indeed, it is doubtful whether 
it was printed in this country. The word 
" its " first occurs in the English version 
of the Bible, in a spurious edition sup- 
posed to have been printed in Amsterdam. 
It may be distinguished from the genuine 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 81 

edition* of the same date, 1653, by that 
very word " its ", which is not found in 
the editions printed by the " printers to 
" the Parliament ", or by the " King's prin- 
" ters " until many years afterwards. So 
when, in your endeavours to escape the 
charge of inaccuracy contained in my 
former letter, you say that the introduc- 
tion of the word a its ", into the English 
version of the Bible, is owing to the "King's 
"printers", you, in trying to escape Scylla, 
are drawn into the whirlpool of Cha- 
rybdis ! 

You speak of my demolishing your J£j?JJ£° " f 
character for accuracy. I do not know Scripture * 
what character you have for accuracy; 



* The genuine edition contains most gross errors , 
for instance, in Rom. vi. 13, it is said, " Neither yield 
" ye your members as instruments of righteousness ", 
instead of " zmrighteousness " ; and, as if to con- 
firm the above teaching, it is said, in 1 Cor. vi. 9, 
"the tmrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of 
"God"; instead of "shall not inherit". Com- 
plaint was made to the Parliament ; and most of the 
copies now extant were cleared of the errors by the 
cancelling of leaves. The spurious edition is com- 
paratively faultless. 



82 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

but this I know, that whenever I see a 
man sensitively jealous of any one point 
in particular of his character, I am not 
often wrong in taking his jealousy to be 
a sure sign of conscious weakness in that 
very point. What are the facts of the 
case with regard to yourself? I have 
given several instances of your gross 
maccuracy. I take no notice of unim- 
portant misquotations of the Scriptures 
and of my own sentences, though I could 
mention several of each occurring in your 
second essay ; but what are we to say of 
the following ? It is, if intentional, which 
I cannot believe, the boldest instance of 
misquotation of Scripture, to suit a special 
purpose, that I ever met with. I am sure 
it must have been unintentional ; but it 
is such an error, that to have fallen into 
it will, I hope, serve so to convince you 
that you, like other mortals, are liable to 
err ; that the remembrance of it will be 
a powerful restraint on your indignation, 
if others should venture, as I have done, 
to call in question your accuracy. The 
singular instance of misquotation to which 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 83 

I refer is the following. — Speaking of the 
adverb " only " and of its proper position 
in a sentence ; yon say, " The adverb 
" ' only ', in many sentences, where strictly 
" speaking it ought to follow its verb, and 
" to limit the objects of the verb, is in 
u good English placed before the verb. 
" Let us take some examples of this from 
"the great storehouse of good English, 
" our authorised version of the Scriptures. 
" In Numbers xii. 2, we read, ' Hath the 
" c Lord only spoken by Moses ? hath He 
" ' not spoken also by us ?' According to 
" some of my correspondents, and to Mr. 
"Moon's pamphlet (p. 12)*, this ought to 
" be, ' Hath the Lord spoken only by 
" ' Moses ?' I venture to prefer very 
" much the words as they stand ". ' Now, 
strange as it may appear after your asser- 
tion, it is nevertheless a fact that the 
words, as you quote them, do not occur 
either in the authorised version, known as 
King James's Bible of 1611, or in our 
present version, or in any other version 
that I have ever seen ; and the words, in 
* Page 14, in this Edition. 

G 2 



84 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

the order in which you say I and your 
other correspondents would have written 
them, do occur in every copy of the Scrip- 
tures to which I have referred ! So you 
very much prefer the words as they stand, 
do you ? Ha ! ha ! ha ! So do I. When 
next you write about the adverb " only ", 
be sure you quote only the right passage 
of Scripture to suit your purpose ; and on 
no account be guilty of perverting the 
sacred text ; for these are not the days 
when the Laity will accept without proof, 
where proof is possible, the statements of 
even the Dean of Canterbury, 
why do you Before closing this letter, I have just 

call me an 

ass ? one question to ask ; it is this : Why do 

you say I must have " a most abnormal 
" elongation of the auricular appendages"? 
In other words, Why do you call me an 
ass ? I confess to a little curiosity in the 
matter ; therefore pardon me if I press 
the inquiry. Is it because the authorities 
I quoted are " venerable Scotchmen " and 
that therefore you conclude I must be 
fond of thistles?— No ? Well, I will 
guess again. Is it because I kicked at 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 85 

your authority % — No ? Well, once more. 
Is it because, like Balaam's ass, I " forbad 
" the madness of the prophet n f Still, No ? 
Then I must give it up, and leave to my 
readers the solving of the riddle ; and 
while perhaps there may be some who 
will come to the conclusion that the Dean 
of Canterbury calls me an ass because I 
have been guilty of braying at him ; there 
are others, I know, who will laughingly 
say that the braying has been of that 
kind mentioned in Prov. xxvii. 22. 

I am, Rev. Sir, 

Your most obedient servant, 

G. WASHINGTON MOON. 

London, July, 1863. 



86 THE BEAN'S ENGLISH 

Note. — The Dean of Canterbury having 
published a letter exonerating himself 
from the charge of discourtesy, the fol- 
lowing appeared in • The Patriot ' news- 
paper, in answer to that letter. 

THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 

TO THE EDITOR OF THE PATRIOT. 

" Sir, — Permit me to say, in reference to the 
letter from the Dean of Canterbury which you 
published in the last number of ' The Patriot \ 
that I heartily join you in your regret that any 
personalities should have intruded into this 
discussion on the Queen's English, and I gladly 
welcome from the Dean any explanation which 
exonerates him from the charge of discourtesy. 
But I must say, in justification of my having 
made those condemning remarks which called 
forth the Dean's letter, that I was not alone in 
my interpretation of his language. Those who 
had the privilege of hearing the Dean deliver 
his 'Plea', when there were all the accom- 
panying advantages of emphasis and gesture 
to assist the hearers to a right understanding 
of the speaker's meaning, understood the 
epithets which he employed to be intended for 
me; and, as such, generally condemned them. 
My authority is l The South-Eastern Gazette \ 
of May 19th, which published a report of the 
meeting. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. Si 

11 The Dean states, in his explanatory letter, 
that he intended the objectionable epithets not 
for me, but for the hypothetical reader supposed 
by me to be capable of the misapprehensions 
I had adduced. It happens, rather unfor- 
tunately for the Dean's explanation, that I had 
not spoken of any hypothetical reader. Litera 
scrip ta manet, — -judge for yourself. I spoke 
not of what the Dean's faulty language might 
suggest to some imaginary reader, but of what 
it did suggest ; and to whom, but to me ? The 
hypothetical reader is entirely a creation of 
the Dean's. However as he says he intended 
the epithets for this said reader, that is suf- 
ficient. I am quite willing to help the Dean 
to put the saddle on his imaginary "ass"; 
and I think the Dean cannot do better than set 
the imaginary u idiot " on the said ass's back, 
and then probably the one will gallop away 
with the other, and we may never hear any- 
thing more of either of them. 

" I am, Sir, 

" Yours most respectfully, 

"G. WASHINGTON MOON. 

-'Sept. 12th, 1863." 



"Instead of always fixing our thoughts 
"upon the points in which our literature and 
" our intellectual life generally are strong, we 
"should, from time to time, fix them upon 
" those in which they are weak, and so learn to 
" perceive clearly what we have to amend." — 

Matthew Arnold. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



CRITICISM No. III. 

THE CONCLUSION. 

Rev. Sir, 

It gives me great pleasure to withdraw withdrawal 

of the 

the charge of discourtesy contained in my charge of 

<=> J *> discourtesy. 

former letter to you. I cordially accept 
the explanation you have given ; and 
though I cannot quite reconcile your 
statements with all the facts of the case, 
I feel sure that the discrepancy is ap- 
parent, not real ; and that you are sincere 
in saying you did not intend to apply to 
me those epithets of which I complained. 
But allow me to remark that for whom- 
soever they were intended, they are 
" objectionable ". Such figures of speech 
neither add weight to arguments, nor give 
dignity to language ; they serve only to 



90 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

illustrate how easy it is for a teacher of 
others to disregard his own lessons, and 
become oblivious of the fact that all 
teaching, like all charity, should begin 
at home. 
a teacher is Actuated by a sincere love for the 

always a- J 

cHticism. 10 language which, it seems to me, you are 
injuring by precept and by example, I 
resume my criticisms on your essays. 
You constitute yourself a teacher of the 
Queen's English. Were it not so, I 
should consider any strictures on your 
language as simply impertinent; but as 
you have judged it to be right to lecture 
the public on certain improprieties of 
expression which have crept into common 
use; it cannot be out of place for one of 
the public whom you address, to step 
forward on behalf of § himself and his 
companions, and test your fitness for the 
office you have assumed; especially if he 
confine his test to an examination of 
the language used in those very lectures 
themselves. 
"Honor" ^ ne 0iu y deviation which I have 
"faKTr". made from that course is in my second 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 91 

letter. There, noticing your remarks con- 
cerning the practice of spelling without 
the "it" such words as "honour" and 
"favour", I quote from your ' Poems* the 
words so spelt, and add some prefatory 
remarks of yours concerning them. In 
your third essay you speak of the above 
circumstance, and you inform me that 
the words " honor " and "favor ", which I 
quoted from your ' 'Poems ', were from that 
part of the volume which was printed 
in America, and that it was against such 
American spelling that you, in your preface, 
protested. 

Allow me to say, in explanation of my "^i?" 
having unconsciously quoted from the 
American part of the volume, that, as the 
preface stated that the poems which you 
added to the American edition were the 
products of " later years ", it was not un- 
natural for me to believe they were 
those headed "Receot Poems": and it 
was from them that my quotations were 
made. Besides, you call the American 
part of the volume the " nucleus " of the 
edition: therefore, if I had taken my 



92 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

examples of orthography from the com- 
mencement as well as from the end of 
the volume, I should have been justified 
in doing so; for, surely, a "nucleus" is 
that around which other matter is col- 
lected. You do indeed make a strange 
use of the word when you call 400 pages 
of a volume of poems the " nucleus " and 
leave only 29 pages at the end, to come 
under the description of "conglobated 
" matter " ! However, even in those few 
pages of English printing, which, accord- 
ing to your own confession, were under 
your control, I find the word honour 
spelt " honor ", and the word odours spelt 
" odors " The charge, therefore, stands as 
it did; and your explanation has served 
only to draw more scrutinizing attention to 
an inconsistency which otherwise might 
have passed almost unnoticed. 
"No more", So you really defend your ungrammati- 

and "never . . 

again". cal sentence, " If with your interiors speak 
"•no coarser than usual ; if with your 
" superiors, no finer " ; and you not only 
defend it, as allowable, but actually main- 
tain that it is " strictly correct " / the 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 93 

ground of your assertion being that you 
had "no choice" open to you between 
saying "speak no coarser than usual", 
and " speak no more coarsely than usual" ; 
and you objected to the latter expression 
because you believed it would have been 
ambiguous, owing to the term " no more " 
being capable of meaning " never again ". 
Are you not aware that a weak defence 
is a strong admission? It is true that 
"no more" sometimes signifies " never 
"again"; but you well know that it 
never can have that signification when 
it is followed by "than". The phrase 
"speak no more coarsely than usual" 
could never be understood as "speak 
" never again coarsely than usual " ; for, 
such a sentence would be without mean- 
ing. Besides, if you feared that your 
sentence would be ambiguous w^ith the 
expression "no more than", why did you 
use that expression in other parts of your 
essays? For instance, you say, "The 
" Queen is no more the proprietor of the 
"English language than you or I". A 
certain word, you say, " ought no more to 



94 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" be spelt i diocess ', than cheese ought to 
"be spelt 'chess'." Where were your 
scruples about "no more" and "never 
" again", when you wrote these sentences ? 
As for your having no choice between 
saying "speak no coarser than usual" 
and saying " speak no more coarsely than 
" usual " ; you certainly had not well con- 
sidered the subject when you made this 
remark; for, neither of the expressions is 
the best that might have been used; 
indeed, the former is grossly ungrammat- 
ical; and as for the latter, to make it 

Wght to a « right to a t" you must change the " no " 
into " not "; and we shall then have what 
will be correct, — "If icith your inferiors 
" speak not more coarsely than usual"; or, 
" do not speak more coarsely than usual". 

"than" You tell us that "than" governs an 

govern an . _ 

accusative? accusative case. What nonsense ! u 
"than" governs an accusative, the trans- 
lators of the Scriptures were wrong in 
making Solomon say, in Eccles. ii, 25, 
" Who can eat more than If " They should 
have made him say, " Who can eat more 
" than me ? " but even a child would tell 



THE BEAN'S ENGLISH. 95 

you that such an expression would be 
absurd, except under the supposition that 
Solomon was the king of the Cannibal 
Islands. 

In your first 'Plea for the Queen's Eng- ^ H ™ nice " 
' lish\ you laid it down as a rule that l00ks " 
neuter verbs should not be qualified by 
adverbs, but by adjectives; i.e. we ought 
not to say "how nicely she looks", 
but " how nice she looks " ; because, 
the verb "to look", as here used, is a 
neuter verb, one not indicating an action 
but merely a quality or state. Very well ; 
but unfortunately your practice mars the 
good which otherwise might be done by 
your precept; for, "to appear" is as much 
a neuter verb as " to look " used as above ; 
in fact it is but another form of expres- 
sion for the same meaning ; and yet, after- 
ridiculing "young ladies fresh from 
"school", for saying "how nice?y she 
"looks"; you yourself say that the ac- 
count to be given of a certain inaccuracy 
"appears still more plah%" from the 
fact that, &c, &c. If I may be allowed 
to make a somewhat questionable pun, I 



96 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

will say that it appears to me more and 
more plain that you never more com- 
pletely missed your vocation than when 
you began lecturing " boarding-school 
"misses" on the Queen's English. 
Adjectives While remarking on your wrong use 

and adverbs o J o 

of adverbs, I may notice that you say 
"our Lord's own use so frequently of the 
" term ". His use of a particular term 
may be said to have been frequent / but 
it cannot be said to have been "frequently" 
Transpose the words in your sentence 
and you will see this at once. " Our 
"Lord's own so frequently use of the 
" term " ! Surely no boarding-school miss 
would ever write thus. It is the verb that 
requires the adverb ; the noun requires the 
adjective. He used the term frequently ; 
but his use of it was frequent. 
The prepo- ^ a former letter I called attention to 
"j£om». your injudicious use of the preposition 
"from " ; and I pointed out the necessity 
for guarding against suggesting any idea 
which has no real connexion with the 
matter of which you may be speaking. 
I gave, as an example of this kind of fault, 



z:-:i lead's z::-?l:$z 

your sentence, u Sometimes the editors of 
" our papers tall, from their ignorance, into 
" absurd mistakes". Here the preposition 
"from", immediately following the verb 
"fall", suggests the absurd idea of editors 
falling from their ignorance. In your 
third essay you repeat the iault, and speak 
of " architectural transition, from the ven- 
"erable front of an ancient cathedral". 
The sentence runs thus, u A smooth front 
"of stucco may be a comely thing for 
" those that like it, but very few sensible 
"men will like it, if they know that in 
u laying it on, we are proposing to ob- 
" literate the roughnesses, and mixture of 
" styles, and traces of architectural transi- 
"tion, from the venerable front of an 
"ancient cathedral" Here, if you per- 
eivQd that the mere juxtaposition of the 
words "transition" and "from" was 
suggestive of an idea which you by no 
means intended to convey, you should 
have separated the words by transposing 
the last clausr : the sentence: I: might 
have been done thus; — "proposing "to 
"obliterate, from the venerable front of 



98 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" an ancient cathedral, the roughnesses 
"and mixture of styles, and traces of 
" architectural transition." You may say 
these are trifles ; but, remember, " it is by 
" attention to trifles that perfection is at- 
" tained ; and, perfection is no trifle." Be- 
sides, to quote your own words, " An error 
" may be, in an ordinary person, a trifle ; 
"but when a teacher makes it, it is no 
" longer a trifle." 

In your remarks on " so", used in con- 
nexion with " as", you say " t so ' cannot 
"be used in the affirmative proposition, 
"nor 'as' in the negative". If this be 
correct, why do you yourself use "as" 
in the negative ? You say " c its' was never 
" used in the early periods of our language, 
" nor, indeed, as late down as Elizabeth." 

But I suppose it is almost useless for- 
me to address you on the subject of the 
various niceties of arrangement which re- 
quire to be attended to in the construction 
of sentences. You seem to care for none 
of these things. Yet, believe me, such 
matters, unimportant as they may appear, 
contribute in a far greater degree than 



THE DEANS ENGLISH. ■ 99 

you imagine, to make up the sum of the 
difference between a style of composition 
which is ambiguous and inelegant ; and one 
which is perspicuous and chastely correct. 

Tou evidently entertain some fear lest ^ s f f e l ar d * 
the study of the rules of conrposition 
should cramp the expression of the 
thoughts ! Xever was there a more 
groundless apprehension: and in propor- 
tion as you are successful in disseminating 
such notions, do you inflict on our lan- 
guage the most serious injury. For- 
tunately for that language, the poison 
of your teaching carries with it its own 
antidote. They who read your essays on 
the Queen's English cannot fail to notice 
the significant fact that he who is thus 
strongly advocating the principle that the 
rules of composition serve no other pur- 
pose than to "cramp the expression of 
"his thoughts", does not exhibit that 
fluency and gracefulness of diction which, 
if his view of the matter were correct, 
would necessarily be displayed in his 
own compositions. 
A reviewer in ' TheNonconformht ' writes 

H 2 



100 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

as follows : — " Away witli all needless and 
" artificial rules, say we, indeed — as ener- 
" getically as the most energetic. But 
"tjie elementary and natural laws of a 
" language fetter only the impatient or the 
"unskilful; and in the living freedom 
" with which genius obeys those laws, is 
" its strength and mastery shown. 

1 The unchartered freedom tries,' 

"says Wordsworth, in vindicating the 
"self-imposed bondage of the Sonnet ; 
"and in so saying, he enunciated a prin- 
" ciple no less philosophically human than 
" wide in its application." 

What was John Milton's opinion on 
this subject? Was he opposed to rules 
and maxims? Did he think they served 
no other purpose than to "cramp the 
"expression of the thoughts"? Quite 
the contrary. 

In the year 1638, Milton, in a Latin 
letter addressed to an Italian scholar who 
was then preparing a work on the gram- 
mar of his native tongue, wrote as follows : 
" Whoever in a state knows how to form 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 101 

" wisely the manners of men and to rule 
"them at home and in war by excellent 
"institutes, him in the first place, above 
"others, I should esteem worthy of all 
"honour; but next to him the man who 
" strives to establish in maxims and rides 
" the method and habit of speaking and 
"writing derived from a good age of the 
" nation, and, as it were, to fortify the same 
"round with a hind of wall, the daring to 
" overleap lohich, a law, only short of that 
" of Romulus, should be used to prevent. 
" Should we choose to compare the two in 
"respect to utility, it is the former only 
" that can make the social existence of the 
"citizens just and holy; but it is the 
" latter that makes it splendid and beauti- 
" fill, which is the next thing to be desired. 
"The one, as I believe, supplies a noble 
" courage and intrepid counsels against an 
" enemy invading the territory ; the other 
"takes to himself the task of extirpating 
"and defeating, by means of a learned 
" detective police of ears and a light in- 
"fantry of good authors, that barbarism 
"which makes large inroads upon the 



102 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" minds of men, and is a destructive intes- 
"tine enemy to genius. Nor is it to be 
"considered of small importance what 
" language, pure or corrupt, a people has, 
" or what is their customary degree of pro- 
priety in speaking it — a matter which 
" oftener than once was the salvation of 
"Athens: nay, as it is Plato's opinion 
"that by a change in the manner and 
"habit of dress serious commotions and 
"mutations are portended in a common- 
" wealth, I, for my part, would rather 
" believe that the fall of that city and its 
"low and obscure condition followed on 
" the general vitiation of its usage in the 
" matter of speech ; for, let the words of a 
" country be in part unhandsome and of- 
"fensive in themselves, in part debased 
" by wear and wrongly uttered, and what 
" do they declare but, by no light indica- 
" tion, that the inhabitants of that country 
" are an indolent, idly-yawning race, with 
"minds already long jDrepared for any 
" amount of servility ? On the other hand, 
"we have never heard that any empire, 
" any state, did not flourish in at least a 



1 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 103 

" middling degree as long as its own liking 
" and care for its language lasted." 

So far John Milton — the noble advocate 
of law and rule, though in virtue of the 
transcendency of his genius he might have 
claimed to be above all rules. Now let us 
have a specimen of your English, — the 
English of the Dean of Canterbury, who, 
avowedly, disregards all Y\\les,fearing they 
toould" cramp the expression of his thoughts"! 

The following example is taken from°|^ re 
your third essay. I read, " 'this* and 'these* 
"refer to persons and things present, or 
"under immediate consideration; 'that 7 
"and 'those' to persons and things not 
"present nor under immediate considera- 
tion; or, if either of these, one degree 
"further removed than the others of which 
" are used ' this ' and ' these ' ". What can 
be the meaning of this last clause ? The 
reader can only wonder and guess. It 
utterly defies all power of analysis, and 
really makes one uncomfortable to read it. 
It forcibly recalls the following anecdote An anecdote 
told of Douglas Jarrold. " On recovering jerroid. 
" from a severe illness, Browning's 'Bordello* 



J 04 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" was put into his hands. Line after line, 
" page after page, he read, but no consecu- 
tive idea could he get from the mystic 
"production. Mrs. Jerrold was out, and 
" he had no one to whom to appeal. The 
M thought struck him that he had lost his 
"reason during his illness, and that he 
j " was so imbecile he did not know it. A 

" perspiration burst from his brow, and he 
"sat silent and thoughtful. As soon as 
"his wife returned, he thrust the mys- 
" terious volume into her hands, crying out, 
" ' Read this, my dear ' ! After several 
"attempts to make any sense out of the 
" first page or so, she gave back the book, 
" saying, i Bother the gibberish ! I don't 
"'understand a word of it'. 'Thank 
" ' Heaven ', cried Jerrold, ' then I am not 
"'an idiot'"! 

'The Edinburgh Review ' thus speaks of 
the poem: — "This poem is, in our judg- 
"ment, from its confused and tortuous 
"style of expression, the most illegible 
"production of any time or country. 
"Every kind of obscurity is to be found 
" in it. Infinitives without their particles 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 105 

" — suppression of articles definite and 
"indefinite — confusion and suppression of 
"pronouns relative and personal — adjec- 
tives pining for their substantives — 
" verbs in an eternal state of suspense for 
"their subjects — elisions of every kind — 
"sentences prematurely killed off by 
"interjections, or cut short in their 
"career by other sentences — parentheses 
"within parentheses — prepositions some- 
" times entirely divorced from their 
"nouns — anacoloutha, and all kinds of 
"abnormal forms of speech, for which 
"grammarians have ever invented names 
" — oblique narrations, instead of direct — 
"and puzzling allusions to obscure persons 
" and facts disenterred from Muratori or 
" Tiraboschi, as though they were perfectly 
"familiar to the reader. Indeed, to be 
"compelled to look at a play through 
"a pair of horn spectacles would be a 
"cheerful pastime compared with the 
" ennui of tracing the course of i Sordello ' 
"through that veil of obscurity which 
"Mr. Browning's style of composition 
"places between us and his conception." 



106 THE BEAN'S ENGLISH. 

4 The Saturday Review J in commenting 
on these remarks, says, " It is but just to 
" Mr. Browning to state that the poem is 
"only a youthful sketch, and that Mr. 
"Browning himself has acknowledged its 
"many faults of expression, and has 
" explained why he thought it profitless to 
" try to rectify them." 
incomplete Here is another specimen from your 

sentence. L J 

essay; I give the entire sentence, which, 
closing with a period, should be complete 
in its sense. You say, " The next thing 
"L shall mention, not for its own sake, 
"but as a specimen of the kind of criti- 
"cism which I am often meeting with, 
" and instructive to those who wish to be 
"critics of other men's language." 

It was not until I had long and hope- 
lessly pondered over your sentence, that 
I discovered what it was you intended to 
say, and what was the reason of my not 
instantly catching your meaning. I find 
that the first clause in your sentence is 
inverted, and that the punctuation neces- 
sary to mark the inversion is incorrect, or 
rather, is altogether omitted ; hence, I 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 107 

read the sentence thus, — "The next thing " 
[which] " I shall mention, not for its own 
" sake, but as a specimen," &c. ; whereas 
your meaning was, — " The next tiling " [,] 
"I shall mention, not for its own sake, 
" but as a specimen," &c. ; or, putting the 
words in their natural order, "I shall 
"mention the next thing, not for its own 
"sake, but as a specimen," &c. Your 
hobby of leaving out commas carries you 
too far ; your readers cannot follow you : 
and if you are going to set aside the rules 
of punctuation as well as those of gram- 
mar, you must give us something better 
than this to convince us of the advantage 
to be gained by adopting such a course. 

Among other curious matters to be''^ ca ,* ed 
found in your essays, is the somewhat 
startling information that the expressions 
"I ainH certain", "I ainH going", are not 
unfrequently used by " educated persons "! 
I suppose you mean, educated at college, 
where the study of English is altogether 
ignored ; . but of that, more by-and-by. 
In the meantime I pass on to the next 
sentence in your essay. Having told us 



108 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

that the above expressions are not un« 
frequently used by " educated persons " ; 
you go on to say, "The main. objection to 
" them is, that they are proscribed by usage ; 
" but exception may also be taken to them 
"on their own account". So I should 
think, if they will use such expressions as 
" I ain't certain ", " I ain't going ". 
and 6ate ' I see you still say "treated", rather 

"treated 

of". than " treated of * e.g. " a matter treated 

"in my former paper". On a previous 
occasion I spoke of this error; but I 
suppose, as you still express yourself in 
the same way, you consider the terms 
synonymous; but they certainly are not. 
To treat is one thing ; to treat of is 
another; and it is the latter expression 
that would convey your meaning. The 
following sentence will exhibit the dif- 
ference between the two terms. " A matter 
" treated of in my former paper was treated 
" by you with indifference." 

Ellipsis. One of the defects noticeable in your 

essays, is that of making your expressions 
too elliptical. Brevity is undoubtedly an 
excellent quality in writing; but brevity 



THE DEANS ENGLISH. 109 

should always be subordinate to per- 
spicuity. This has not been attended to 
in the following sentence, which, singularly 
enough, happens to be upon the very 
subject of ellipsis itself. You say, " Some 
" languages are more elliptical than others ; 
"that is, the habits of thought of some 
" nations will bear the omission of certain 
"members of a sentence better than the 
"habits of thought of other nations" 
\ivill~\. Do you not perceive that but for 
the little word " wiW\ which 1 have added 
to your sentence, the statement would be, 
that " the habits of thought of some 
" nations will bear the omission of certain 
" members of a sentence better than [they 
" will bear] the habits of thought of other 
"nations"? — a truth which no one trill 
be found to deny; but, at the same time, 
a truth which you did not mean to 
affirm. 

The consequence of too free an indul- u Quack, 

quack ? h 

gence in the elliptical form of expres-^ow, 
sion, would probably be that [in the 
language of every-day life, at any rate,] 
all connective words would gradually dis- 



110 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

appear from use ; and we should, perhaps, 
ultimately find ourselves, for brevity's 
sake, adopting the style exemplified in 
the anecdote given by Farrar, and which 
runs thus. — "An Englishman, in China, 
"seeing a dish placed before him, about 
"which he felt suspicious, and wishing 
"to know whether it was duck, said 
"with an interrogative accent, 'Qitaclc, 
"'quack?' He received the clear and 
"straightforward answer, ' Bow^ woio\ f 
" This, no doubt was * as good as the 
"most eloquent conversation on the same 
"subject between an Englishman and a 
" French waiter ; but I doubt whether it 
" deserves the name of language." * 
^at l aii" Among the peculiarities of style ob- 
servable in your essays is your evident 
fondness for feeble expletives which add 
nothing to the meaning of the sentences 
to which they are attached. You say, 
for instance, 

"I did not allude to the letter at 
"all". 

*\ Farrar's 4 Origin of Language, ,' p. 74, as quoted 
in Max Miiller's ' Lectures f p. 346. 



THE BEAN'S ENGLISH. Ill 

" Twice one not being plural at all ". 

" Some found fault with me for dealing 
" at all with the matter ". 

" Is it really part of the verb ' have ', 
"at all?" 

" If we use the past tense at all ". 

" Without any pains at all ". 

"The use of the plural verb at all is 
"unusual". 

I should much like to know the origin 
of the phrase, and what difference in the 
meaning of any of the above sentences 
there would be if the words were struck 
out. 

Irishisms also should be avoided; for Irishisms: 

— "and the 

" the like o' them" are anything but &** "• 
pleasing in essays on the Queen's Eng- 
lish. 

You say, "Wrong iinder standing of 
" obsolete phrases and the like ". 

"Patrobas, Aristobulus and the Wee". 
"Making out that Andromache was An- 
" drew Mackay and the like ". 

" Such expressions as c It is me ', c I 
" i knew it to be him ', and the like ". 

"We continually hear and read 'This 



112 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

" ' much I know ', ' Of that much I am 
"'certain', and the like". 

"To take it in good part, to take a 
"man for his brother, and the like". 

"'Plain', 'soft', 'sweet', 'right', 
" ' wrong ', and the like". 

"I mean in my youth, or when I was 
"in Cheshire, or the like". 

What ! * Not yet over that "pons asi?io- 
u mtm" of juvenile writers, the " con- 
" struction louche"? You were there 
w^hen I wrote to you my first letter ; and 
you are there still? This ought not to 
be ; for, the effect of this error is so 
ridiculous, and the error itself may be 
so easily avoided. You say, "Though 
"some of the European rulers may be 
" females, when spoken of altogether, they 
"may be correctly classified under the 
"denomination 'kings'." In this sen- 
tence, the clause which I have put in 
italics has, what our Gallic neighbours 
designate, "a squinting construction", it 
looks two ways at once; that is, it may 
be construed as relating to the words 
which precede, or to those which follow. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 113 

Your former error of this sort was in the 
omission of a comma ; this time you have 
erred by the insertion of a comma, and in 
each case a like result is produced. Had 
there been no comma after the word 
"altogether", the ambiguity would have 
been avoided, because the words in italics 
would then have formed part of the 
last clause of the sentence: but as the 
italicised clause is isolated by commas, 
the sentence is as perfect a specimen of 
thjis error as ever could have been given. 
Absurd as would be the sentence, its con- 
struction is such, that we may understand 
you to say, "Some of the European rulers 
"may be females when spoken of alto- 
" gether ' ; or we may understand you 
to say, "when spoken of altogether, they 
"may be correctly classified under the 
" denomination c kings ' " ; but, even in 
this last clause, it is evident that you say 
one thinor an( j mean another. The con- The differ- 

° ence be- 

text shows that what you meant, was, £ ween " may , 

J ' J be correctly 

" they may correctly be classified ", not ancf'^may ' 
" they may be correctly classified ". Slight classified", 
as is the apparent difference here, the real 

I 



114 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

difference is very great. If I say, " they 
"may be correctly classified", my words 
mean that the classification may be made 
in a correct maimer; but if I say, "they 
" may correctly be classified ", the meaning 
is, that it is correct to classify them. In 
the first example, the adverb qualifies the 
past participle " classified " ; in the second, 
it qualifies the passive verb to "be clas- 
sified"; or, in other words, the adverb 
in the former instance describes the thing 
as being properly done ; and, in the latter 
instance, as being a thing proper to do. 
The Dean One word more before we finish with 

calls Her 

fetnaie' a ^ n * s Grange sentence of yours. On page 
65 I had to ask you why, when speak- 
ing of a man, you used the slang word 
"individual". I have here, to ask you a 
question which is still graver. — Why, 
when speaking of women, do you apply 
to them the most debasing of all slang- 
expressions? You speak of the highest 
person in the land, and that person a lady, 
and your description of her is one that is 
equally applicable to a dog ! — Her Majesty 
is — a female/ I am sure that all who 



THE DEAIPS ENGLISH. 115 

desire your welfare will join me in hoping 
that Her Majesty will not see your book. 
It is but too evident that in condemning 
these slang phrases, as you do in your 
' Queerfs Eaglish\ page 246, you are 
echoing the sentiments of some other 
writer, rather than expressing your own 
abhorrence of slang. I shall be glad if 
you are able to inform me that I am mis- 
taken in this particular ; and that you 
have not been quoting, but have been 
giving us original matter. 

Reverting; to the error occasioned by a The import- 

J ance ot cor- 

comma in the former part of your sen-^^° c " 
tence, I may give, as another example of 
the importance of correct punctuation, 
an extract from a letter in ' The Times ' of 
June 19th, 1863 ; there, simply by the 
placing of the smallest point, a comma, 
before, instead of after, one of the smallest 
words in the language, the word "on", 
the whole meaning of the sentence is 
entirely altered, and it is made to express 
something so horrible that the reader 
shudders at the mere suggestion of it. 

c p 

The letter is on American affairs, and 

I 2 



116 ' THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

the writer says, "The loss of life will 
" hardly fall short of a quarter of a million ; 
"and how many more were better with 
"the dead than doomed to crawl, on the 
"mutilated victims of this great national 
"crime" ! He meant to say — " than doomed 
" to crawl on, the mutilated victims of this 
" great national crime." 
"in a fix". But I must hasten to the conclusion of 
my letter. You say, " The derivation of 
"the word, as well as the usage of the 
"great majority of English writers, fix 
" the spelling the other way ", i.e. This 
(as well as that) fix it ! Excuse me, but 
I must ask you why you write thus, even 
though by putting the question, I put 
you " in a fix " to answer it. 
Thejincci You speak of " the final 'u 1 in tenour ", 
" tenour " and c the finpl 's' in months ". You 

andthefinal 

, might just as reasonably speak of the 
final "a" in the alphabet. 

These errors are so gross that I cannot 
forbear reproving you in your own words. 
" Surely it is an evil for a people to be daily 
" accustomed to readEnglish expressed thus 
" obscurely and ungrammatically : it tends 



" months '' 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 11? 

"to confuse thought, and to deprive law- 
" gitage of its proper force, and by this 
" means to degrade us as a nation in the 
" rank of thinkers and speakers" 

In your second essay you are loud in variety not 

always 

praise of variety in composition ; and !' ^ rm " 
variety enough you undoubtedly have 
given us ; but, unfortunately, the variety 
is not of that description which, in our 
school days, writing-masters made us 
describe in our copy-books as " charming ". 
We have found, in your Essays on the 
Queen's English, errors in the use of 
pronouns ; errors in the use of nouns, 
both substantive and adjective ; errors 
in the use of verbs and of adverbs ; and 
errors in the use of prepositions. There 
are errors in composition, and errors in 
punctuation ; errors of ellipsis, and errors 
of redundancy ; specimens of feeble ex- 
pletives, and specimens of circumlocution ; 
specimens of ambiguity, and specimens 
of squinting constructions ; specimens of 
slang, and specimens of misquotation of an 
opponent's words ; and, worst of all, a 
specimen of a misquotation of Scripture. 
Add to this the following specimens of 



118 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

tautology and tautophony, and the list 
will, I think, be tolerably complete. 
Tautology As you have introduced into your 

and tautoph- 
ony- essays the short preface to your Poems, 

that preface becomes fairly amenable to 

criticism, and I remark that in it you say, 

" This will account for& few specimens of 

" Transatlantic orthography for which the 

" author must not be accounted responsible". 

The following is from your third essay, 
— "An officer whose duty it is to keep a 
" counter-roily or check on the accounts of 
"others. It seems also clear, from this 
u account of the word, that it ought not," &c. 

Then I read, " One word on c this ' 
"and 'that 5 , as we pass omcard". 

"At last we abated the nuisance by 
"enacting, that in future the debatable 
"first syllable should be dropped". 

"Thought and speech have ever been 
" freer in England than in other countries. 
"From these and other circumstances, 
"the English language has become more 
" idiomatic than most others ". 

" The sentences which I have quoted are 
" but a few out of the countless mstances 
"in our best writers, and in their most 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 119 

"chaste and beautiful passages, in which 
"this usage occurs. On examining into 
"it, we find"— &c. &c. 

Enough ! It was my intention to say a 
few words of caution to students of the 
Queen's English, on your advice to them 
to disregard the rules of grammarians and 
be guided by custom and common sense ; 
but, on second thoughts, I am sure that 
any further remarks must be unnecessary ; 
for if your plan cannot do more for its 
teacher, there need be no fear that it will 
be followed by any sagacious pupil. 

I had fully intended to speak also on 
the necessity of a more thorough study 
of English at our Universities ; but any 
remarks on that, will likewise be con- 
sidered needless; for, your own English 
is, itself, a volume on the subject.* 

* "To such as can hardly believe, that in our 
"Public Schools, Colleges, and Universities, there 
"is not the slightest special training in English, 
' even for those who are about to enter Holy Orders, 
" I can only say that, however surprising it may 
" seem, it is the simple fact." " Some have said, 
" that no English teaching is needed in our Univer- 
"sities, for men are sufficiently instructed in the 



120 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

Ah ! Doctor Alford, we find you guilty 

" language when they * come up \ I meet this by a 
" simple denial, adding that most men are not suffi- 
M ciently instructed even when they l go down \ I 
" appeal to College Tutors, Examiners, Bishops' 
il Chaplains, and to the Public, whether I exaggerate 
" or not in making this assertion."— '.4 Plea for the 
1 Study of the English Language \ by Alexander J. D. 
D'Orsey, b.d., English Lecturer at the Corpus 
Christi College, Cambridge, pp. 2, 37. 

Read also the ' Report of Her Majesty's Com- 
< missioners appointed to inquire into the manage- 
1 ment of certain Colleges and Schools ". (Presented 
to Parliament by command of Her Majesty, March, 
1864.) The following is from the Report of the exam- 
ination of the head master of Eton, " the greatest 
" and most influential of our Public Schools." 

Question, No. 3530, [Lord Clarendon]. "What 
" measures do you now take to keep up English at 
"Eton?" — "There are none at present, except 
" through the ancient languages." 

Question, No. 3531. " You can scarcely learn 
" English reading and writing through Thucydides ? '» 
"—No." 

Question, No. 3532, [Sir S. Northcote]. "You 
" do not think it is satisfactory ? " — " No ; the 
"English teaching is not satisfactory, and as a 
"question of precedence, I would have English 
<' taught before French." 

Question, No. 3533. " You do not consider that 
" English is taught at present ? " — " No" 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 121 

of injuring by your example a glorious 

" In Greek and Latin, no doubt, the clergy have 
" advanced as fast as their age, or faster. University 
"men now write Greek Iambics, as every one 
" knows, rather better than Sophocles, and would 
"no more think of violating the Pause than of 
"violating an oath. A good proportion of them 
"are also perfectly at home in the calculation 
"of perihelions, nodes, mean motions, and other 
"interesting things of the same kind, which it 
" is unnecessary to specify more particularly. So 
"far the clergy are at least on a level with 
" their age. But this is all that can be said. 
" When we come to their mother-tongue a dif~ 
"ferent story is to be told. Their English — the 
" English of their sermons — is nearly where it was a 
" hundred years ago. The author of i Twenty years 
" ' in the Church } makes the driver of a coach remark 
"to his hero, that young gentlemen from college pre- 
" paring to take orders appear to hctve learned 
" everything except their own language. And so 
" they have. Exceptions, of course, there are, many 
" and bright ; but in the main the charge is true. 
"The things in which, compared with former ages, 
" they excel so conspicuously, are the very things 
" which have least concern with their special calling. 
" The course of their progress has reversed the 
" course of charity ; — it began abroad, and has never 
" yet reached home." — ''Gornhill Magazine? May, 
1861. 



122 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

inheritance, such as has been bequeathed 
to no other nation under heaven.* 

I can believe that the English language 
is destined to be that in which shall arise, 
as in one universal temple, the utterance 
of the worship of all hearts. Broad and 
deep have the foundations been laid; and 
so vast is the area which they cover, that 
it is co-extensive with the great globe itself. 
For centuries past, proud intellectual giants 
have laboured at this mighty fabric ; 
and still it rises, and will rise for genera- 
tions to come : and on its massive stones 
will be inscribed the names of the pro- 
foundest thinkers, and on its springing 
arches the records of the most daring 
flights of the master minds of genius, whose 
fame was made enduring by their love of 
the Beautiful and their adoration of the All 
Good. In this temple the Anglo-Saxon 

* Grimm says, " The English tongue possesses a 
" veritable power of expression, such as, perhaps, 
" never stood at the command of any other language 
<l of man." — ' Ur sprung der SpracheJ p. 52. 

" Take it all in all, it is the grandest and the 
" richest of modern tongues." — ' Edinburgh Review^ 
July, 1864, p. 176. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 123 

mosaic of the sacred words of truth will 
be the solid and enduring pavement; the 
dreams of poets will fill the rich tracery 
of its windows with the many-coloured 
hues of thought; and the works of lofty 
philosophic minds will be the stately 
columns supporting its fretted roof, whence 
shall hang, sculptured, the rich fruits of 
the tree of knowledge, precious as " apples 
" of gold ", — " the words of the wise ". 

I am, Rev. Sir, 

Yours most respectfully, 

G. WASHINGTON MOON. 

London, May, 1864. 



"Curam verborum rerum volo esse solici- 
u tudinem." — Quintilian. 



EXAMPLE versus PRECEPT. 



The Dean said ['Good Words ', 1863, page 
437] "The less you turn your words right or 
"left to observe Mr. Moon's rides, the better". 
It will provoke a smile on the face of the 
reader to be told that although the Dean 
gives this advice to others, he himself has, in 
the second edition of his work, altered and 
struck out, altogether not fewer than eight- 
and-twenty passages which Mr. Moon had 
condemned as faulty. For the entertainment 
of the curious in such matters, the original 
passages as condemned in c The Dean's 
' English ', and the same passages as altered in 
the second edition of ' The Queen's English ', 
are subjoined in parallel columns. It is 
scarcely requisite to say that " altered " does 
not necessarily imply " corrected". 



126 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



THE DEAN S ENGLISH. 



THE 
QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 



So far from its being "so 
"well known a fact" that we 
reserve the singular pronouns 
"thou" and "thee" entirely 
for our addresses in prayer to 
Him who is the highest Per- 
sonality, it is not a fact. — p. 7. 



Struck out. 



II. 

You say, " The great enemies 
" to understanding anything 
"printed in our language are 
"the commas. And these are 
"inserted by the compositors 
"without the slightest com- 
" punction." I should say that 
the great enemy to our under- 
standing this sentence of yours 
is the want of commas. — p. 11. 



A comma in- 
serted between 
" compositors " 
and "without 
" the slightest 
" compunction ". 
—p. 99. 



III. 

You speak of persons " mend- 
" ing their " ways "; and in the 
very next paragraph you speak 
of " the Queen's highioay ", 
and of "by-roads" and Wjprir 
'" Date roads ". — p. 12. 



Struck out. 



THE BEAN'S ENGLISH. 



127 






THE DEAN S ENGLISH. 

IV. 

Immediately after your speak- 
ing of u things without life ", 
you startle us with that strange 
sentence of yours, — " I will 
"introduce the body of my 
" essay ". Introduce the tody ! 
—p. 13. 



TnE 

QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 



Struck out. 



" But to be more serious ", 
as 3'ou say in your essay, and 
then immediately give us a sen- 
tence in which the grave and 
the grotesque are most incon- 
gruously blended. I read, " A 
" man does not lose Ms mother 
" now in the papers" I have 
read figurative language which 
spoke of lawyers being lost in 
their papers, and students be- 
ing buried in their books ; but 
I never read of a man losing 
his mother in the papers. — p. 
13. 

VI. 

In the sentence, U .I only 
" oring forward some filings ", 
the adverb "only" is similarly 



In the papers, a 
man does not now 
lose his mother. — ■ 
p. 251 



128 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



THE DEANS ENGLISH. 

misplaced : for, in the following 
sentence, the words "Plenty 
"more might be said", show 
that the "only" refers to the 
" some things ", and not to the 
fact of your bringing them for- 
ward. The sentence should 
therefore have been, " I bring 
"forward some things only", 
—p. 15. 

VII. 

In your essay, you say, "I 
"remember, when the French 
" band of the ' Guides ' to ere 
" in this country, reading in 
" the ' Illustrated News ' ". 
Were the Frenchmen, when in 
this country, reading in ' The 
4 Illustrated News ' f or did you 
mean that you remembered 
reading in ' The Illustrated 
'News'?-?. 19. 



THE 
QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 



Struck out. 



I remember, when 
the French band of 
the l Guides ' were 
in this country, to 
have read in the 
4 Illustrated News \ 
—p. 249. 



VIII. 

You also say, " It is not so 
"much of the great highway 
" itself of the Queen's English 
44 that I would 7ioio speak, as of 
"some of the laios of the road ; 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



129 



THE DEAN S ENGLISH. 



THE 
QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 



" the by -rules, to compare small 
" things with great, which hang 



The by-rules, so 

to speak, which 
-up framed at the various sta- hang up framed &t 

" tions ". What are the great 

things which hang up framed 

at the various stations ? — p. 20. 



the various 
tions. — p. 5. 



sta- 



IX. 

So, too, in that sentence 
which introduces the body of 
your essay, you speak of u the 
" reluctance which we in modern 
"Europe have to giving any 
" prominence to the personality 
" of single individuals in social 
"intercourse" ; and yet it was 
evidently not of single indi- 
viduals in social intercourse 
that you intended to speak, but 
of giving, in social intercourse, 
any prominence to the person- 
ality of single individuals. — p. 
20. 

X. 

Continuing my review of your 
essay, I notice that it is said of 
a traveller on the Queen's high- 
way, "He bowls along it icith 
" ease in a vehicle, which a few 
" centuries ago would have been 



Struck out. 



K 



130 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



THE DEANS ENGLISH. 

u drolcen to pieces in a deep rut, 
" or come to grief in a oottom- 
Ci less swamp ". There being 
here no words immediately be- 
fore " come ", to indicate in 
what tense that verb is, I have 
to turn back to find the tense, 
and am obliged to read the 
sentence thus, " would have 
" oeen broken to pieces in a 
" deep rut, or [would have been] 
" come to grief in a bottomless 
" swamp ". — p. 28. 



THE 
QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 



He bowls along 
it with ease in a 
vehicle, which a 
few centuries ago 
would have been 
broken to pieces 
in a deep rut, or 
would have come 
to grief in a bot- 
tomless swamp. — 
p. 2. 



XL 

Further on, I find you speak- 
ing of " that fertile source of 
"mistakes among eur clergy, 
" the mispronunciation of Scrip- 
u ture proper names ". It is 
not the " mispronunciation of 
" Scripture proper names " 
which is the source of mistakes ; 
the mispronunciation of Scrip- 
ture proper names constitutes 
the mistakes themselves of 
which you are speaking; and 
a thing cannot at the same time 
be a source, and that which 
flows from it, — p. 29. 



Struck out. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 131 

THE 
THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 

XII. 

In some sentences your pro- 
nouns have actually no nouns 
to which they apply. For ex- 
ample, you say, " a journal A journal pub- 
" published oy these people", lished by the ad- 
By what people ? Where is the vocates of this 
noun to which this relative change.— p. 14. 
pronoun refers ? In your head 
it may have been, but it cer- 
tainly is not in your essay.— p. 
35. 

XIII. 

Only eight-and-twenty nouns The paragraph 

intervening between the pro- has been entirely 

noun l W and the noun "habit" reconstructed. — p. 

to which it refers !— p. 37. 42. 

XIY. 

You make the assertion that 
,,. . ,, .. „ In the English 

the possessive pronoun "its' . -,,*.. 

• j..i »T7 7.7 version of the Bi- 
never occurs in the "English __ _ 

,, . /• ^x t).t7 „ T t ble, ra&ate 2?& *fe 
"version of the Bible \ Look ' _ . _ 

. , T .j. - ,, m , , present authorized 

"at Leviticus xxv, o, "That v, . 

, . , ,, ' .. jwm m ^ rw^ 

" which groweth of its own ■ _ _ T . 

"accord ".-p. 37. of James 1.-?. 7. 

XV. 

There are, in your second 
essay, some very strange speci- 

K 2 



182 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



THE DEAN S ENGLISH. 

mens of Queen's English. You 
say, "The one rule, of all others, 
"which lie cites". Now as, in 
defence of your particular 
views, you appeal so largely to 
common sense, let me ask, in 
the name of that common sense, 
how can one thing be another 
thing ? How can one rule be of 
all other rules the one which I 
cite ? — p. 54. 



THE 
QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 

The one rule 
which is supposed 
by the ordinary 
rhetoricians to re- 
gulate the arrange- 
ment of words in 
sentences, is, &c. — 
p. 123. 



XVI. 

You say, " The verb is not 
u a strict neuter-substantive". 
Your sentence is an explanation 
of your use of the word "oddly", 
in the phrase, " would read 
"rather oddly"; and oddly 
enoug% you have explained it : 
"would read" is the condi- 
tional form of \he verb ; and 
how can that ever be either a 
neuter-substantive, or a substan- 
tive of any other kind? — p. 56. 

XVII. 

Again, you say, " The whole 
" number is divided into two 
" classes : the first class, and the 
" last class. To the former of 



In a previous 
paragraph we now 
read of a verb, " of 
that class called 
neuter -substantive, 
i.e., neuter, and 
akin in construc- 
tion to the verb- 
substantive to be", 
—p. 206. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



133 



THE DEANS ENGLISH. 



THE 
QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 



" these belong three : to the lat- 

"ter, one". That is, "To the 

u former of these belong three: 

"to the latter [belong] one"; 

oneMongf When, in the latter ^^"5^!!!: 

part of a compound sentence, 

we change the nominative, we 

must likewise change the verb, 

that it may agree with its 

nominative. — p. 57. 



To the former of 



to the latter belongs 
one. — p. 146. 



XVIII. 

The error is repeated in the 
very next sentence. You say, 
" There are three that are ranged 
u under the description k firsV: 
" and one that is ranged under 
" the description c last 1 ". That 
is, " There are three that are 
"ranged under the description 
"' first'; and [there are] one 
" that is ranged under the des- 
cription 'last'". There are 
one ! — p. 57. 



There are three 
that are ranged 
under the descrip- 
tion ' first ' ; and 
there is one that is 
ranged under the 
description i last '. 
—p. 146. 



XIX. 

It appears to me that, before 
you have finished a sentence, 
you have forgotten how you 



134 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

THE 
THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. QUEEN* S ENGLISH. 

began it. Here is another in- 
stance. You say, " We call a 
" ' cup-ooard ' a i cubbard \ a 
" * half -penny y a i haepenny \ 
"and so of many other com- 
"pound words 11 . Had you be- 
gun your sentence thus, " We We call a * cup- 
" speak of a ' cup-board ' as a * board ' a ' cub- 
4 cubbard 7 , of a * half-penny' as 'bard', a 'half- 
a 4 haepenny ', it would have ' penny ' a ' hae- 
been correct to say, " and so of i pny ', and we 
" many other compound words"; similarly contract 
because the clause would mean, many other com- 
"and so [we speaJc] of many pound words. — p. 
" other compound words " ; but 53. 
having begun the sentence with 
" We call 11 it is sheer nonsense 
to finish it with "and so of 11 ; 
for it is saying, "and so [we 
"call] of many other com- 
" pound words ". — p. 58. 

XX. 

You speak of rules laid down 
" by the dictionaries " and the 
"professors of rhetoric 11 ; thus 
substituting, in one case, the 
works for the men ; and, in the 
other case, speaking of the men 
themselves. Why not either 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



135 



THE DEAN S ENGLISH. 



THE 
QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 



speak of the " compilers of dic- 

" tionaries" and the "professors 

"of rhetoric"; or else speak 

of the "dictionaries" and the Struck out. 

" treatises on rhetoric" f — p. 59- 



XXI. 

The construction of some of 
your sentences is very objec- 
tionable : you say, "/ have 
"noticed the word i party ' used 
"for an individual, occurring 
"in Shakspeare" ; instead of, 
"I have noticed, in Shak- i n Shakspeare 
" speare, the word ' party ' used p. 246. 
"for an individual." But how 
is it that you call a man "an 
" individual" f — p. 65. 



The word ' party*, 
for a man, occurs 



XXII. 

You say, " While treating of 
" the pronunciation of those 
"who minister in public, two 
"other words occur to me 
"which are very commonly 
" mangled by our clergy. One 
"of these is i covetous', and its 
" substantive * covetousness \ 
" I hope some who read these 



136 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



THE DEAN S ENGLISH. 

" lines will be induced to leave 
" off pronouncing them ' cove- 
" ' tious ' and ' covetiousness '. 
" I can assure them, that when 
u they do thus call them, one, 
" at least, of their hearers has 
" his appreciation of their teach- 
ing disturbed". I fancy that 
many a one who reads these 
lines will have his appreciation 
of your teaching disturbed. — 
p. 69. 

XXIII. 

Speaking of the word "its", 
you say, "Its apparent occur- 
"rence in the place quoted is 
"simply due to the King's 
"printers, who have modernised 
" the passage ". Apparent oc 
currence ! It is a real occur- 
rence. Are we not to believe 
our eyes ? — p. 80. 



THE 
QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 

I hope that some 
of my clerical read- 
ers will be induced 
to leave off pro- 
nouncing them ' co- 
'vetious' and l co- 
* vetiousness \ I 
can assure them, 
that when they do 
thus call the words, 
&c— p. 63. 



Struck out. 



XXIV. 

As for the " King's printers ", 
it was not they who introduced 
the word "its" into the Eng- 
lish Bible. The first English 
Bible in which the word is 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



137 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



THE 
QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 



An alteration by 



found, is one that was printed 
at a time when there was no 
King on the English throne, 
consequently when there were the printers. — p. 7. 
no u King's printers": it was 
printed during the Common- 
wealth. — p. 80. 



XXV. 

The following is, if inten- 
tional, which I cannot believe, 
the boldest instance of mis- 
quotation of Scripture, to suit 
a special purpose, that I ever 
met with. You say, " In Num- 
" bers xii, 2, we read, ' Hath 
"'the Lord only spoken by 
"'Moses? hath He not spoken 
"'also by us?' According to 
" some of my correspondents, 
"and to Mr. Moon's pamphlet, 
" this ought to be ' Hath the 
" i Lord spoken only by Moses ?' 
" I venture to prefer very much 
"the words as they stand". 
Now, strange as it may appear 
after your assertion, it is never- 
theless a fact that the words, as 
you quote them, do not occur 
in the authorized version, known 



138 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

as King James's Bible of 1611, 
or in our present version, or in 
any other version I have ever 
seen ; and the words, in the 
order in which you say I 
and your other correspondents 
would have written them, do 
occur in every copy of the 
Scriptures to which I have 
referred ! So you very much 
prefer the words as they stand, 
do you ? Ha ! Ha ! Ha ! So do 
I. When next you write about 
the adverb "only", be sure 
you quote only the right pas- 
sage of Scripture to suit your 
purpose. — p. 82. 



THE 
QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 



The Dean found 
another passage, 
which suited his 
purpose, and quo- 
ted it— p. 143. 



XXVI. 



"Though some of the Euro- 
pean rulers may be females, 
"when spoken of altogether, 
" they may be correctly classi- 
u fied under the denomination 

kings ' ". In this sentence, 
the clause which I have put in 
italics has, what our Gallic 
neighbours designate, "a squin- 
ting construction", it looks 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 139 

THE 

THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 

two ways at once ; that is, it Though some of 
may be construed as relating to the European ru- 
the words which precede, or to lers may be fe- 
those which follow. Absurd as males, they may 
would be the sentence, its con- be correctly classi- 
struction is such, that we may tied, when spoken 
understand you to say, "Some of altogether, un- 
" of the European rulers may der the denomina- 
te females, when spoken of tion " kings". — p. 
"altogether."— p. 112. 97. 

XXVII. 

You say, " The derivation of 
" the word, as well as the usage The derivation 
" of the great majority of Eng- of the word, as 
il lish writers, fix the the spelling well as the usage 
"the other way", i.e. This [as of the great ma- 
well as that] fix it! Excuse jority of English 
me, but I must ask you why writers, fixes the 
you write thus, even though by spelling the other 
putting the question, I put you way. — p. 33. 
"in a fix" to answer it. — 
p. 116. 

XXVIII. 

"At last we abated the At last we abated 

" nuisance by enacting, that the nuisance by 
" in future the debatable first . enacting that in 

" syllable should be dropped '\ future the first syl- 

— p. 118. lable should be 

dropped. — p. 56. 



140 THE DEAN'S ENGLISH. 

Of course the Dean was wise to alter 
his sentences ; — to turn his words right and 
left in observance of certain rules. The 
joke is, that he should do so after having 
advised his readers to do nothing of the 
sort. We congratulate the Dean that, con- 
cerning the alteration of sentences, we are 
able in his case to reverse the old adage and 
say, " Do as the Dean does, and not as the 
" Dean says" 



APPENDIX. 



A Criticism from The English 
Churchman. 

The Queen? s English. Stray Notes on 
Speaking and Spelling. By Henry 
Alford, d.d., Dean of Canterbury. 
(London : Strahan and Co. ; Deigton, 
Bell, and Co., pp. 257.) 

We scarcely know whether to look upon the 
labours of Dean Alford in the cause of our 
language as a loss or as a gain. In many ways 
his remarks on the Queen's English must have 
been attended with good results. The wide 
circulation which they obtained, when first 
published in ; Good Words \ has caused a vast 
number of persons to pay far more attention 
to this much-neglected subject than they had 
ever done before. Many have been brought 
for the first time to bestow a serious attention 
on their mother-tongue, and to see that the 
consideration of the words in which their 
thoughts are clothed is a matter of no small 



142 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

moment, and furnishes a true test of a nation's 
character and progress. In these papers they 
have been warned against the use of mean and 
slipshod English, against an affected and un- 
natural style, and, in fact, against most of the 
faults which mar the language of the present 
day, and which may be found so abundant in 
the columns of the periodical press, and. in the 
conversation of half-educated persons. On 
the other hand, the Dean has set an evil ex- 
ample by rendering the standard of right and 
wrong in language more wavering and un- 
certain than ever : custom, according to him, 
is the only court of appeal, and the laws of 
grammar are to be left to pedants and peda- 
gogues. If this is to be the case, it seems 
hopeless to bring many of those, who habitu- 
ally break the laws of language, to a sense of 
their shortcomings. They have been brought 
up from their birth amongst persons who com- 
mit the same faults, and they are unable to 
see the nature of these faults. If referred to 
the laws of grammar, they appeal to the au- 
thority of Dean Alford to show that it is 
pedantic to be guided by grammarians ; if 
referred to the custom of educated persons, 
they maintain their own experience against that 
of their reprovers, and declare that their own 
usage is the customary one, and that the one 
recommended to them is contrary to custom. 

Amongst the paradoxical statements of Dean 
Alford, we have selected some of the most 
prominent for comment. At the time of the 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 143 

first appearance of these papers, a great, and, 
in our opinion, not unreasonable, outcry was 
made against the sanctioning of the phrase, 
"It is me". The Dean brings forth Dr. La- 
tham in support of his opinion, and refers us 
to the following extract from that gentleman's 
4 History of the English Language'' : — 

"We may call the word me a secondary nomi- 
native, inasmuch as such phrases as It is me — It is I, 
are common. To call such expressions incorrect Eng- 
lish, is to assume the point. Is o one says that c'est mol 
is had French, and c'est je is good. The fact is, that 
with us the whole question is a question of degree. 
Has or has not the custom been sufficiently prevalent 
to have transferred the forms me, ye, and you, from 
one case to another ? Or perhaps we may say, is there 
any real custom at all in favour of /, except so far as 
the grammarians have made one ? It is clear that the 
French analogy is against it. It is also clear that the 
personal pronoun as a predicate may be in a different 
analogy from the personal pronoun as a subject''. 

TVe have great respect for Dr. Latham's 
learning, but in a matter like the present we 
cannot submit to his authority. Modern wri- 
ters on language, when treating of well-known 
words and phrases, are often apt to seek op- 
portunities for displaying their own ingenuity 
in giving unusual explanations of them, and 
Dr. Latham is by no means free from a par- 
tiality for crotchets of this kind. There is no 
analogy between English and French in this 
matter. It is a peculiarity of the French 
language that each pair of words which repre- 



144 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

sents the different cases of the singular personal 
pronouns in other languages is in French 
represented by three words instead of two. 
I, me— je, me, moi ; thou, thee — tu, te, toi ; 
he, him — il, le, lui. Moi, toi, lui, are used as 
nominative cases when coming after the verb 
If Dr. Latham's reasoning is right, that be 
cause we have in French c'est moi, not c'est je 
therefore, it is right to say in English, "it is 
"me", not "it is I": then it follows that 
because we say c'est toi, not c'est tu, c'est lui, 
not c'est il, it is right to say "it is thee", "it 
"is him", or "her". It seems to us as bad 
grammar to say, "it is me", in English, as c'est 
me in French. He further says that " when 
" constructions are predicative, a change is 
" what we must expect rather than be surprised 
"at". We see this change of construction in 
French when the pronouns are predicative, 
because each pronoun has three distinct forms, 
but as English, together with the rest of the 
European languages (with which we are ac- 
quainted), has only two forms of personal 
pronouns, therefore the change cannot take 
place when the construction is predicative. 
Another reason given by Dr. Latham for the 
usage is, that me is not the proper, but only the 
adopted accusative of I, i being in fact a 
" distinct and independent form of the personal 
"pronoun". We do not see why, because me 
is the adopted accusative of 7", it should become 
"a secondary nominative " . All the European 
languages of which we have any knowledge 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 145 

have an adopted accusative for the first person 
singular, but we do not find in them any traces 
of its being used as a secondary nominative 
(though it may appear so in French) ; why, 
then, are we to grant this license to English, 
merely to gratify a careless habit which may 
easily be corrected ? We now come to consider 
Dean Alford's own remarks on these three little 
words. He seems to think that the reason for 
the substitution of me for / is a shrinking from 
obtruding our own personality, and endeavours 
to confirm his view by referring to an instance 
of the contrary practice in the well-known 
passage : — 

u He said unto them, ' It is I, be not afraid' . This is 
a capital instance ; for it us shows at once why the 
nominative should be sometimes used. The Majesty 
of the Speaker here, and his purpose of re-assuring the 
disciples by the assertion that it was none other than 
Himself, at once point out to us the case in which it 
would be proper for the nominative, and not the ac- 
cusative to be used". 

We will venture to say that the sole reason 
which the translators of the Bible had for writ- 
ing "it is I" in this verse, was because they 
considered it the proper grammatical phrase, 
and "it is me" ungrammatical. How would 
Dean Alford account for the two following 
verses, Matt. xxvi. 22, 25, u And they were ex- 
" ceeding sorrowful, and began every one of 
" them to say unto Him, Lord, is it I ? " " Then 
"Judas, which betrayed him, answered and 



146 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

"said, Master, is it I?" Certainly, according 
to the Dean's reasoning, we ought in each case 
to have, " Is it me?" but there is no trace of 
such a usage throughout the Bible. 

Dean Alford asks the question, " What are we 
" to think of the question whether than does or 
" does not govern an accusative case ? " — 

" The fact is, that there are two ways of constructing 
a clause with a comparative and ' than'. You may say 
either HlianP or Hhanme\ If you say the former, 
you use what is called an elliptical expression, i.e. an 
expression in which something is left out — and that 
something is the verb ' am\ 'He is wiser than I', 
being filled out, would be, 'He is wiser than I am'. 
' He is wiser than me ' is the direct and complete con- 
struction". 

We agree that there are two ways of con- 
structing the clause — a right way and a wrong- 
way. " He is wiser than I " is right. " He is 
u wiser than me " is wrong. There is no occa- 
sion to make use of an ellipse at all. Than is 
a conjunction, and cannot, therefore, govern an 
accusative case, as it is a fundamental rule of all 
languages that conjunctions should couple like 
cases. We cannot see in what way " He is 
" wiser than me " can be more complete than 
" He is wiser than I " . Again, we find the rule 
laid down by the Dean, that, when solemnity is 
required, the construction in the nominative is 
used ; and he quotes John xiv. 28, " My father 
"is greater than I" . This would be of some, 
weight if he could bring a single instance in 
which than of itself governed an accusative in 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 147 

a case where solemnity was not required, but 
we do not think that he will find one in the 
Bible. In Gen. xxxix. 8, Joseph says to 
Potiphar's wife, "Behold, my master knoweth 
" not what is with me in the house, and he hath 
" committed all that he hath to my hand ; there 
M is none greater in the house than I ; neither 
"hath he kept back", &c We cannot suppose 
that the translators wished to represent Joseph 
as attaching any solemnity to the words " there 
"is none greater than I", which are introduced 
in the middle of a long sentence. The reason 
for their occurring thus is because the transla- 
tors knew that the phrase, " there is none greater 
"than me", is entirely ungrammatical. Dean 
Alford considers that the invariable use of 
"than whom", instead of "than who", is a 
proof that than governs an accusative case, as in 
'Paradise Lost\ ii. 299:— 

" Which when Beelzebub perceived, than whom, 
"Satan except, none higher sat". 

"We quite agree that, to say "than who", 
would be intolerable in this instance to most 
ears, but we do not consider that this single 
anomalous expression is enough to warrant us 
in saying that "than" takes the accusative. 
The expressions " than whom " , " than which " , 
are very sparingly used in writing, and never 
in ordinary conversation. Probably the first 
person who wrote "than whom", did so in 
ignorance of the rules of grammar, and the 
error was so perpetuated by his copyists that it 

L 2 



148 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

became a settled usage. Another explanation 
of it is, that the "m" was added for the sake 
of euphony. However that may be, we cannot 
allow that one anomaly of this kind can justify 
us in going counter to the grammar and usage 
of all languages. 

Of course, when than couples a pronoun to a 
word in the accusative case, the pronoun must 
also be put in the accusative ; we must say u He 
"likes you better than me", and not "he likes 
" you better than I " ; the latter phrase is inad- 
missible.* In our opinion this shows completely 
that than is nothing more than a conjunction, 
and it is an unheard-of thing in any language 
that a conjunction can govern an accusative. 
As is a word of precisely the same character as 
than ; would Dean Alford defend the vulgarisms, 
" I am as tall as him" , " He is as tall as me " ? 

A correspondent has kindly sent us a well- 
known example of the latter usage from one of 
our standard poets : — 

" The nations not so blest as tliee 
u Must in their turn to tyrants fall, 

"Whilst thou shalt flourish, great and free, 
" The dread and envy of them all." 

Thomson's c Rule Britannia? 

In our opinion the first line of this stanza is 
utterly indefensible. 

The Dean upholds the use of the verb "to 

* " He likes you better than me ' ' is, He likes you better 
than [he likes] me ; and, " He likes you better than I" 
is, He likes you better than I [like you~\. The meaning 
of each phrase is widely diiferent.-— G.W.M. 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 149 

" leave", in a neuter, or, as he bids us term it, 
an absolute sense. He defends the sentence 4l I 
" shall not leave before December 1 " on the 
ground that the verb is still active, but the ob- 
ject is suppressed. We deny that to "leave' 5 
is here used in an active sense ; it is synony- 
mous with "to go away", "depart", &c, which 
are neuter verbs. The Dean brings forward 
the instances of the verbs " to read" and "to 
"write", as though they were analogous cases, 
because they may be used at will either transi- 
tively or intransitively. These verbs, however, 
themselves express an occupation, just as much 
as to run, to sit, or to stand. If we wish to 
know how any one is spending his time, it is a 
sufficient answer to say " He is reading " ; if we 
are aware of that fact, and wish to know what 
is the object of his study, then we must use the 
verb transitively, and say, "He is reading ' The 
" ' Queen's English ' ", or any other book. " To 
"read" has become to all of us a complete 
notion ; " to leave " is not so ; and, as we said 
before, must be used as an equivalent for to 
depart, or go away, in the phrase quoted. This 
is an unnecessary extension of its signification, 
and as all such extensions give rise to more or 
less ambiguity, they should be avoided. The 
use of a verb in an intransitive as well as a 
transitive sense must always be a matter de- 
pending entirely on authority. Such a use of 
" to leave" was ignored formerly, and has arisen 
only within comparatively few years from the 
carelessness of slipshod speakers and writers. 



150 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

In the present day it is eschewed by good wri- 
ters of English ; by others it is used invariably, 
but quite unnecessarily, in a neuter sense. 

In Dr. Alford's objections to the restrictions 
placed by grammarians on the words first and 
last, former and latter, he makes the following 
remarks : — 

" l First f is unavoidably used of that one in a series 
with which we begin, whatever be the number which 
follow ; whether many or few. Why should not last be 
used of that one in a series with which we end, whatever 
be the number which preceded, whether many or few ? " 

We should have thought that the answer was 
quite evident. First has two meanings ; it 
stands for the superlative of the comparative 
former, and for the ordinal corresponding to the 
cardinal number one. Last is -used only as the 
superlative of latter; it cannot, therefore, be 
ever used in numerical statements. In speaking 
of a book in two volumes, which are numbered 
1 and 2, we refer to the 1st or 2nd volume; 
but 1st is not here the same as first, the super- 
lative of former. This is easily shown in the 
case of most of our large public schools, where the 
6 th form is the first, and the 1st form the last in 
the school. If we had such a word as onetli to 
stand as the ordinal of one, we should say that 
the 6th form is the first, and the oneth the last ; 
as it is, we are obliged to make first do duty in 
each case. 

We do not agree theoretically with the Dean's 
remarks on the aspiration of the " h " in humble, 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 151 

though practically we think it advisable to follow 
the growing usage of the day, and sound the 
"h". It was formerly almost as common to 
say umble as it was to say onour and (h)our. In 
regard to the words "ospital", u erb", and 
"umble", our author says that all of them are 
" very offensive, but the last of them by far the 
"worst, especially when heard from officiating 
u Clergymen ". We believe that the reason 
why the Clergy have so commonly adopted the 
practice of sounding the "h" in humble, is 
because educated persons cannot endure the 
idea of its being said of them that they drop 
their "h's"; directly, therefore, the custom 
became prevalent of aspirating humble, the 
Clergy at once took it up. It will be the same 
as soon as it becomes at all usual to sound the 
"h" in honour, honesty, &c. We deny that 
" umble and hearty no man can pronounce with-. 
" out a pain in his throat " ; it is just as easy to 
pronounce as " under heaven". 

In one or two places the Dean becomes hyper- 
critical ; for instance : — 

" By-the-by, what are we to think of the phrase which 
came in during the Crimean war, ' The right man in the 
right place" 1 P How can the right man ever be in the 
wrong place ? or tbe wrong man in the right place ? We 
used to illustrate the unfitness of things by saying that 
the round man had got into the square hole, and the 
square man into the round hole ; that was correct enough; 
but it was the putting incongruous things together that 
was wrong, not the man, nor the hole ". 

It is the custom in all languages, when it is 



152 opimojsrs of the press. 

desired that an idea shall be impressed forcibly 
on a reader, to repeat the word in some way or 
other. Thus, in the 2nd chapter of Genesis, 
the original of " thou shalt surely die" is "dy- 
" ing thou shalt die " ; so likewise, in the New 
Testament, with the Hebraism, " with desire 
"have I desired". The Greek tragedians 
abound in such pleonasms, especially in the 
repetition of an adjective, by qualifying the 
verb with the adverb formed from the adjective. 
In the present instance, " the right man in the 
"place", sounds wretchedly flat in comparison 
with " the right man in the right place ". 

There are man}^ other remarks in this work 
with which we cannot agree, but we have no 
wish to weary our readers with further criti- 
cisms on this somewhat dry subject. — The Eng- 
lish Churchman, January 28, 1864. 



THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 
A Criticism from l TJie Patriot.'* 

Dean Alford has collected into a book his papers 
contributed to . 4 Good Words ' and, of course, 
has subjected them to a fresh and final revision. 
He tells us, indeed, that "now, in a considerably 
"altered form, they are presented to the pub- 
" lie " ; so that we may fairly regard both the 
canons and the composition of this volume as 
the deliberate and final setting forth of the 



OPINION'S OF THE PRESS. 153 

Dean's notions of the proprieties of the English 
language. No plea of hasty writing, such as 
unfortunate newspaper writers, or public lec- 
turers, or even magazine contributors, might 
fitly urge is valid here. The Dean tells us, 
too — what we are very glad to learn, and what 
speaks well for the Christian placability of both 
parties — that the somewhat sharp passage of 
arms betwixt Mr. Moon and himself has ended 
in an invitation to dinner and a real friendship. 
" From antagonism we came to intercourse ; 
"and one result of the controversy I cannot 
" regret — that it has enabled me to receive Mr. 
" Moon as a guest, and to regard him hencefor- 
" ward as my friend." Will this deprive the 
public of the benefit of Mr. Moon's criticisms 
upon the present volume ? We should be sorry 
to think so ; for there really is much to be said 
about it, and, we fear, much ault to be found 
with it. Dean Alford has rendered good service 
to his generation. He was an exemplary work- 
ing clergyman ; and he is, we doubt not, as 
exemplary a Dean. He is an excellent poet, 
and his beautiful hymn, " Lo, the storms of life 
" are breaM?ig" y sung to sweet music, has often 
soothed our soul. We cannot call him an 
accomplished Greek scholar ; but he has com- 
piled the most useful working Greek Testament 
of our generation ; amenable to a thousand 
adverse criticisms, but laboriously bringing to- 
gether almost all that working clergymen need. 
But with all this we cannot regard him as an 
authority on the philosophy of the English 



154 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

language, or as an example of its more accurate 
use. It is strange that men should imagine 
themselves that which they are so far from 
being, that they are unconscious even of their 
defects. Only a scholar of the widest philo- 
logical reading and of the nicest discrimination 
should have presumed to write a book on the 
use and abuse of the Queen's English. No 
doubt Dean Alford thinks that he is such a 
scholar, and that his composition, if not in his 
ordinary sermons, yet in this volume, is fault- 
less. We regret to be compelled to think other- 
wise. His style, where not positively ungram- 
matical, is loose, and flabby, and awkward ; his 
sentences are ungainly in construction, and 
sometimes positively ludicrous in the meaning 
which they involuntarily convey. We will take 
a few instances ; and we begin with the third 
sentence in the book. 

"It" (the term " Queen's English") u is one 
" rather familiar and conventional, than strictly 
"accurate". As Dean Alford uses it, the ad- 
verb "rather" qualifies the terms "familiar" 
and " conventional ". He means it to qualify the 
term " strictly accurate", and should have said, 
" It is one familiar and conventional rather than 
" strictly accurate". 

" For language wants all these processes, as 
" well as roads do", is scarcely so elegant as 
a critical Dean should have written. 

Again: "And it is by processes of this kind 
"in the course of centuries, that our English 
"tongue has been ever adapted", &c. ; instead 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 155 

of "It is by processes of this kind that, in the 
" course of centuries, our English tongue ", &c. 

" Carefulness about minute accuracies of in- 
" flexion and grammar may appear to some very 
" contemptible ". We trust that the Dean is 
not one of these; but would it not have been 
better to have written, " may to some appear 
" very contemptible " ? 

" The other example is one familiar to you, 
"of a more solemn character ". And what is it 
to those given to levity ? The Dean meant to 
say, " The other example is of a more solemn 
" character, and is one familiar to you". 

" The first remark that / have to make shall 
"de on the trick now so universal across the 
"Atlantic". Here tenses are curiously con- 
fused ; and the Dean apparently forgets that 
the term universal is absolute, and does not ad- 
mit of a comparative. 

" The late Archdeacon Hare, in an article on 
" English orthography in the * Philological Mu- 
. " l seum * ". We did not know that the English 
orthography of the 'Philological Museum' was 
peculiar or needed an article. The Dean means 
u in an article in the ' Philological Museum ' on 
"English orthography". 

" We do not follow rule in spelling the other 
" words, but custom ". An elegant writer would 
have said, " In spelling the other words we do 
" not follow rule, but custom". 

These specimens occur in the first twelve 
pages ; how many the entire volume would 
afford, is beyond our calculation. A little farther 



156 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

on we read: — "As I write these lines, which I 
u do while waiting in a refreshment-room at 
" Reading, between a Great Western and a 
" South-Eastern train ". We did not know that 
the refreshment-room at Reading stood between 
two trains. 

With many of Dean Alford's canons, both of 
derivation, pronunciation, and even spelling, 
we have almost equal fault to find ; but we 
forbear. We must say, however, that, notwith- 
standing Mr. Latham's authority, and at the risk 
of being reckoned "grammarians of the smaller 
"sort", we are still unconvinced of the pro- 
priety of saying, even colloquially, " It's me ", 
and of the pedantry of saying, "It's I ". 

We must add, too, that a somewhat unseemly 
egotism and gossipiness pervade the book — 
pardonable enough in popular lectures, but 
surely to be excluded from a philological trea- 
tise. The Dean seems to have no plan, but just 
to say anything that comes first, and to say it 
anyhow. Perhaps he thinks the chit-chat of a 
Dean sufficient for all persons of lesser dignity. 

Dean Alford, of course, says many just and 
useful things, and will, we trust, do something 
to correct some errors and vulgarisms. But it 
is one thing to read Dean Alford's sentences, 
and it is another to read Macaulay's. — 'Patriot,' 
January 14, 1864. 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 157 

A Plea f 07- the Queen's English. By Henry 
Alford, d.d., Dean of Canterbury. c Good 
'Words', March, 1863. 

A CRITICISM BY PERNICKITY PAWKIE, GENT. 

[From the ' Glasgow Christian News.'''] 

The " Southrons " (so we at one time called 
them) are unlike any other of the nations in 
regard to the treatment which they bestow upon 
their language. They call it their " mother- 
" tongue ", and yet, if the Dean of Canterbury 
be a trustworthy witness, their mothers did not 
speak it ; if you check any Southron for mis- 
pronouncing a word, he will gravely inform you 
that he goes by Entick, Sheridan, Knowles, or 
somebody else. You cannot get the Southrons, 
as a people, to "go by " anyone authority for 
five minutes at a time in the accentuation of 
their brothej'-tongxie ; and yet you will find 
yourself greatly mistaken if you suppose that 
you are getting from any Southron the credit 
of speaking "the Queen's English," unless 
you condescend to imitate some foppish speaker 
of that licentious language. 

The Dean of Canterbury has written what he 
calls ^ A Plea for the Queen's English' in 
4 Good Words ' for March ; and I shall be bold 
enough to show that, in some particulars, the 
Dean has really written adversely towards the 
Queen's English. 



158 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

The Dean has written as follows : — 

" In common talk the pronouns ' /', i he ', ' she ', aro 
freely used. But when the form of the context throws 
these pronouns into unusual prominence, we shrink, I 
suppose, from making so much of ourselves or one 
another as the use of them in the nominative case would 
imply. Was there ever one of us who, when asked 
1 Who's there ' ? did not first and most naturally reply, 
' It's me \ And though reproved, and it may be even 
corrected as a child for the mistake, which of us is there 
that does not continually fall into it, if it he one, again 
and again?" 

Now let us observe what the Dean says in the 
latter part of the above passage : he questions 
if the act of placing the word me where I ought 
to be is a mistake ! Dr. Caird should be most 
truly grateful to Dean Alford ; for the Doctor 
says — " Believing in that love stronger than 
u death which for me, and such as me y drained 
"the cup of untold sorrows". If an English 
Dean has not something useful to do, let him 
by all means avoid teaching us had English. 
The shade of Sir Walter Scott ought to be 
most truly grateful to Dean Alford; for the 
Dean is of opinion that the following may not 
really be a mistake : — 

" Yet oft in Holy Writ we sec 
" Even such weak minister as me 
" May the oppressor bruise ". 

Any one who has given the least attention to 
the subject must have observed that the Dean 
is pleading for a blunder which is just the ever- 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 150 

lasting one on both sides of the Tweed : and 
that the Dean's idea of its being the result of a 
sweet modesty is the veriest nonsense — as if, 
forsooth the spirit of egotism is not as fre- 
quently practised under the word me as under 
the word Iff 

The guide in the matter is very simple : let 
the verb be supplied, and the monstrous blunder 
frowns in all its hideousness. Let the sentences 
which I have above quoted from Dr. Caird 
and Sir Walter Scott ^implemented (as our law 
jargon words it), and the blunder glares out 
upon us. Let us write as follows : — 

"Believing in that love stronger than death which 
for me, and such as me [am], drained the cup of untold 
sorrows " — ' Religion of Common Life' , p. Q6. 

" Yet oft in Holy "Writ we see 
" Even such weak minister as me [am] 
" May the oppressor bruise ". 

i Mo,rmion' canto v, xxxi. 



* "This shrinking from the use of the personal pronoun, 
this autophoby, as it may be called, is not indeed a proof 
of the modesty it is designed to indicate ; any more than 
the hydrophobia is a proof that there is no thirst in the 
constitution. On the contrary it rather betrays a mor- 
bidly sensitive self -consciousness" 

" So far indeed is the anxiety to suppress the personal 
pronoun from being a sure criterion of humility, that 
there is frequently a ludicrous contrast between the con- 
ventional generality of our language and the egotism of 
the sentiments expressed in it." 

4 ' Modesty must dwell within, in the heart ; and a brief 
/ is the modestest, most natural, simplest word I can 
use." 'guesses at Truth,' pp. 142, 14S, 150. 



160 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

But it is not in grammar only that the Gre- 
cian Dean endeavours to mislead us Scotchmen. 
He tries his hand also at pronunciation. He 
writes as follows : 

" We still sometimes, even in good society, hear 
ospital, erb, and umble — all of them very offensive, hut 
the last of them "by far the worst ". 

"Will it be believed that the dictionaries are 
against Dean Alford (all except two) in the pro- 
nunciation of the above words ? It surely re- 
quires a man to be possessed of not a little 
meism before he presumes to write as he has 
done respecting the foregoing words. The fol- 
lowing dictionaries are in his favour (they are 
but tico) — namely Webster and Jameson ; while, 
on the contrary, Walker, Sheridan, Perry, 
Knowles, Smart, Wright, Craig, and Surenne 
are, all of them, against the Dean ; and 
Worcester countenances both ways. 

The fact is, that this word is simply the 
French one — humble — and was pronounced by 
our Norman ancestors -as the above eight dic- 
tionaries continue to pronounce it: two only 
being against them, and one of these an 
American. 

The Dean says, " The English Prayer-Book 
u has at once settled the pronunciation of this 
" word [humble] for us, by causing us to give 
" God our 'humble and hearty thanks' in the 
"General Thanksgiving. Umble and hearty ", 
says the Dean, " no man can pronounce without 
"a pain in his throat". 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 161 

Did ever such drivelling proceed from a 
very Reverend Dean of Canterbury ? But this 
is not all ; for, giving the vulgar mode of 
uttering the entire sentence, the critic is so 
utterly given over to special pleading that he 
writes as follows : — 

u Umble and hearty no man can pronounce without 
a pain in his throat ; and c umblanarty ' he certainly 
never was meant to say". 

If this very Reverend Dean decides the pro- 
nunciation of the Greek language on such frivo- 
lous data as he does this word humble, I must 
hold him to be of but little worth as a philolo- 
gist; and I advise my compatriots to let most 
votes carry the day. With our eight dictionaries 
(all of them of much higher standing than the 
two opponents) let us decide that the word 
" humble " shall not be aspirated. 

The very Reverend Dean appears to me to be 
out of his element when treating of a matter of 
taste. He writes as follows : — 

"iZumble and JSearty is the only pronunciation which 
will suit the alliterative style of the prayer, which has 
in it not only with our lips hut in our lives " 

There is coarseness and the absence of poetic 
tact in this observation. Humble, in order to 
sympathise with the sentiment which is ex- 
pressed in the word, ought to be umble. H is 
a hearty letter : Z7"is despondent. Alliteration, 
if it teaches anything in such a matter, teaches 

M 



162 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

the very reverse of this unsympathetic and 
unpoetic work-day Dean's whimsies upon the 
subject. The word Jiurrible ought, in the prayer, 
to be enunciated with a pause — it ought to be 
uttered with feeling, which requires a pause — it 
ought not to be followed rapidly by the words 
" and hearty " which ought to express a different 
kind of feeling — a warmth, a cordiality, a vigour. 
Let the Dean appeal to anything but some hum- 
drum in holy orders, and it will be given against 
him, or I am in the last degree mistaken. 

The Dean is pleased also to be facetious upon 
"penny-a-liners". "We, Scotchmen, have no 
especial complaint to make against him on this 
score ; but this we may say, he may just as well 
attempt " to stem the Thames with a pitchfork ' 
as to stereotype the " Queen's English " as he 
calls it. Benjamin Franklin could bring down 
the electric fluid from the clouds — an invention 
which has carried language with the speed of 
lightning, but he could not control human lan- 
guage, and yet his /-ism was one-ism when 
compared with the efforts of the Dean upon 
this particular. In a letter to Noah Webster, 
dated Dec. 26, 1789, Franklin writes as follows : — 



" I find that several new words have been introduced 
into our parliamentary language. For example, I find 
a verb formed from the substantive notice. I should not 
have noticed this were it not. Also another verb from 
the substantive advocate. The gentleman who advocates 
or has advocated that motion. Another from the sub- 
stantive progress. The committee having progressed. 
The wor&opposed (though not a new word) I find used in 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 103 

a new manner, as, The gentlemen who are opposed to 
this new measure. If you happen to be of my opinion 
(continues Franklin) with respect to these innovations, 
you will use your authority in reprobating them ". 



No doubt Dean Alford would have lent a 
helping hand here ; but with what success ? 
The progress of language is a thing far 
mightier than the breath of Deans ! 

I take exception to the Dean's treatment of 
the word press, which has not yet ceased to be a 
collective noun. He has no right (on his prin- 
ciples) to write as follows : — 

"Allude to is used in a new sense by the 
" press, and not only by them, but". The Dean 
ought here to have written ll it n instead of 
"them;" and yet we find this teacher playing him- 
self with the inaccuracy (so he calls it) of saying 
" twice one are two ", and " three times three are 
"nine". In order to prove the grammatical 
incorrectness of these two assertions, the clever 
Dean alters the form of the expression, and, 
"presto"! the juggle is concluded. " What we 
" want (says the Dean, being simply this, that 
" three taken three times makes up, is equal to 
"nine". Now, admitting this to be correct, 
Mr. Dean — admitting three not to be plural any 
more than one (which is just what you should 
prove, but also just what you do not attempt to 
prove) nevertheless, admitting your improved 
premises ; yet, when we say what you " want " 
to say in another mode, if that other mode have 
a plural nominative, the verb must also be 

M 2 



164 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

plural ; and we say " three times" must be plural, 
and so must even three. 

I might for example, say of a man and his 
wife — u they twain are one flesh"; but you, Mr. 
Dean, might reply to me (as you are now doing), 
" What we want to say is simply this — this man 
"is, and that woman is, one flesh — makes up, is 
"equal to one flesh." All very good! But so 
long as we speak of them as ttoain, we must (in 
order to be grammatical) employ the word are 
respecting them. 

It appears to me, Pernickity Pawkie, that this 
Southron and Prelatic Dean has mystified and 
bewildered his reasoning powers respecting the 
grammar of the multiplication table by a highly- 
wrought abstraction upon the Athanasian Creed 
respecting the triune and official subsistencies 
of the Godhead — " Three in one sense, and one 
"in another" — may, by some misconception of 
the fact, have deranged the ideas of numerical 
relation in the Dean's mind, and it will account 
for his hallucination in reference to the mode of 
stating the multiplication table. It is this 
Dean's idiosyncracy to refine. — The Christian 
Neics, May 2, 1863. 



THE QUEEN'S ENGLISH. 

A Criticism from Routledge's Magazine, 
Oct., 1864. 

The study of language is one of the most 
instructive and, at the same time, one of the 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 165 

most interesting occupations with which we can 
employ ourselves ; and, in the present age of 
advanced education, it is absolutely necessary 
for everybody to obtain a knowledge of his own 
language, and to read, speak, and write it in 
accordance with the known rules on the subject. 
However well taught a man may be in other 
branches of study, he will never make his 
way in the world unless he can speak cor- 
rectly, since correct speaking is, as it were, 
the outward attribute of the gentleman, and 
the one by which his other qualifications are 
judged. 

The Dean is evidently not a graceful writer 
of English, as he is sure to have put forth all 
his strength in the composition of a book on 
language. This strength, however, seems to 
consist in devising the most unnatural manner 
of writing good English, and in violating some 
of Lord Karnes's most important rules with 
regard to words expressing things connected 
in thought being placed as near together as 
possible. 

4 The Queerfs English? we must state, pro- 
fesses to be a reprint from a widely circulated 
periodical entitled i Good Words? and the 
subject is said to be 'presented to the public 
4 in a considerably altered form.' 

This is strictly true, for, having compared the 
reprint with the original articles, we are able to 
compliment the Dean on the many judicious 
alterations he has made ; thanks, perhaps, to 
the suggestions given by a gentleman styled, in 



166 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

a country paper, u a knight, bearing on his 
" shield the emblem of the lunar orb ", and other 
lovers of pure English who have considered that 
the reverend grammarian has in some way- 
defiled the pure well of English. 

Sitting down with the book, * and the 
volume of ' Good Words'' for 1863 before 
us, we note no great difference until we 
come to the following expression: " The Queen 
"is of course no more the proprietor of the 
"English language than you or I v — (see l Good 
i Words' 1 ), but in the volume we have " than any 
" of us." Why this change ? On page 152 of 
the book we read : " What are we to think of 
" the question, whether l than' does or does not 
" govern an accusative case? 'than I': 'than 
" me': which is right ? My readers will probably 
"answer without hesitation, the former. But 
" is the latter so certainly wrong ? We are 
" accustomed to hear it stigmatized as being so ; 
" but, I think, erroneously. Milton writes, 
" ^Paradise Lost, y ii, 299, — 

« t, ^"^{qIx w ]ien Beelzebub perceived, than whom, 
Satan except, none higher sat.' 

" And thus every one of us would speak : l than 
" ■ who ', would be intolerable. And this seems to 
"settle the question.'''' 

So the Dean thinks. We, however, do 
not. Poetry is not often considered a high 
authority on matters of grammatical construc- 
tion, although the Dean seems to think it should 

* Second Edition. 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 167 

be, since this is the only instance of "than" 
governing the accusative that he deigns to 
cite : besides, it is evident that in many cases, the 
employment of the accusative instead of the 
nominative, gives to the sentence another mean- 
ing, thus \ 

1 He likes you better than me. 

2 He likes you better than I. 

Surely it is manifest to everybody that the 
first form means that he likes you better than 
(he likes) me, and that the latter means, he likes 
you better than I (like you) ; and yet our Dean 
in an authoritative manner says, that you may 
say either " than /", or " than me ", but that the 
former should be used only when solemnity is 
required, as " My Father is greater than I." 

Is solemnity required when mention is made 
of the Queen in regard to her proprietorship of 
the English language ? We trow not. Why, 
then, does our Dean lay down a rule, and break 
it on the first page of his Essays ? This reflec- 
tion seems to have occurred to the mind of the 
author, who probably in his reprint weighed 
with care every expression he made use of. 
This at any rate seems the only reason why he 
should alter " than I n to " any one of us," and 
thus screen himself under an expression which 
fits either rule. 

Let us pause for a short time and note what 
some authorities write about this conjunction. 
Lowth is of opinion that such forms as " thou 
" art wiser than me " are bad grammar. Mr. E. 
F. Graham, in his excellent book on English 



168 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

Style, quotes the objective case after "than" as 
a downright grammatical error, whilst our old 
friend Lindley Murray devotes a page and a half 
to the discussion of this question, and, after 
citing the lines of Milton just quoted, concludes 
his notice by saying, "The phrased han whom, 
" is, however, avoided by the best modern 
" writers ". The crowning point of all, however, 
is that the very author whom Dean Alford 
quotes in support of his theory, says in the 
first book of ' Paradise Lost ' ; — 

" What matter where, if I be still the same, 
And what I should be, all but less than hef " 

Near the end of a paragraph in the first 
Essay occurs the following sentence, which is 
omitted in the book : — " And I really don't wish 
" to be dull ; so please, dear reader, to try and 
" not think me so." 

It was wise, indeed, on the Dean's part, to 
omit this sentence in his book, for probably it 
contains the worst mistake he has made. Try 
and think, indeed ! Try to think, we can 
understand. Fancy saying " the dear reader 
"tries and thinks me so"; for, mind, a con- 
junction is used only to connect words, and can 
govern no case at all. However, as the Dean 
has not allowed this to appear in his book, we 
refrain from alluding further to it. 

As the Dean admits that his notes are for 
the most part insulated and unconnected, we 
presume that we need make no apology if our 
critical remarks happen to partake of the same 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 169 

character; for, the reader will easily understand 
that criticism on unconnected topics must itself 
also be unconnected. 

Who does not recollect with pleasure those 
dear old ladies, Sairah Gamp and Betsey Prig ? 
" Which, altering the name to Sairah Gamp, I 
" drink," said Mrs. Prig. 

"As I write these lines, which I do while 
" waiting in a refreshment room at Reading 
" between a Great Western and a South Eastern 
" train," says the Dean. The time when, and the 
place where, great men have written their books 
is always interesting information, and we thank 
Dean Alford for telling us where he wrote this 
elegant sentence ; but fancy, what a very small 
refreshment room there must be at Reading, if 
it stands between two trains. May we venture 
to suggest that the sentence would have been 
improved if "which I do", and the words from 
" between" to "train," had been altogether 
omitted. " Which you are right, my dear," 
says Mrs. Harris. 

On page 67 the Dean comes to that which he 
says must form a principal part of his little 
work. The principal part means, we believe, 
more than half of anything, but as in the present 
work there are evidently two principal parts (at 
least), it appears that the volume contains more 
than the two halves. Perhaps the Dean was 
waiting between two trains in Ireland when he 
penned this sentence. 

With regard to the demonstrative pronouns, 
" this refers to the nearest person or thing, and 



170 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

" that to the most distant," says Murray. This, 
however, is not Dean Alford's view of the 
matter. 

After mentioning the name Sophoenetus (and 
no other), he writes, " Every clergyman is, or 
"ought to be, familiar with his Greek Testa- 
" ment ; two minutes reference to that will show 
"him how every one of these names ought 
" to be pronounced." 

Who is right here — Lindley Murray or the 
Dean of Canterbury ? Stop ! stop ! Not so fast. 
In theory, the Dean agrees with our gram- 
marian ; for, eleven pages further on, he says, 
— " ' this 1 and * these 1 refer to persons and things 
" present, or under immediate consideration ; 
"'that 1 and 'those 1 to persons and things not 
" present, nor under immediate consideration ; 
" or if either of these, one degree further re- 
" moved than the others of which are used ' this 1 
"and ' these 111 . He then mentions a Scottish 
friend, who always designates the book which he 
has in hand as " that looJc. 11 Surely this Scotch- 
man and the Dean belong to one family. 

It is not often in books that we see an author 
plainly contradict himself within the space of 
sixteen lines. 

On page 183 we read, "I should speak cor- 
"rectly if I said, 'Dr. Johnson flew upon me' : 
"incorrectly, if I said, 'he fell upon me'." 

On the same page we read — 

"And as to my correspondent's last dictum, 
" that 'he fell upon me', would be incorrect ; let 
"him look at 1 Kings ii, 25, 34, 46, in which 
" places it is said of Adonijah, Joab, and Shimei, 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 171 

" respectively, that Benaiah, the son of Johoiada, 
u fell upon him that he died." 

Now in all these actions we have instances of 
men falling upon others. How happens it that 
what is right in one case is wrong in the other ? 

We now come with much pleasure to the last 
fault which we have to find with Dr. Alford's 
book. We have purposely deferred any mention 
of this particular subject until now, on the 
same principle as that which actuated the 
schoolboy who always kept the best till the last. 

On page 280 we read the following excellent 
remarks : — 

"Avoid, likewise, all slang words. There is 
" no greater nuisance in society than a talker of 
" slang. It is only fit (when innocent, which it 
" seldom is) for raw schoolboys and one-term 
" freshmen, to astonish their sisters with." 

Of course after expressing himself so strongly 
on this point, it is not to be expected that, in a 
work on the Queen's English, Bean Alford will 
make use of slang terms. Let us see. 

On page 2, he tells us, " He bowls along it with 
"ease in a vehicle, which a few centuries ago 
" would have been broken to pieces in a deep rut, 
" or (would have) come to grief in a bottomless 
" swamp." 

In the original notes the words would have 
were omitted. One of his censors then sug- 
gested that the sentence was " or would have 
" oeen come to grief". On page 132 of his book, 
the Dean defends his elliptical mode of spelling : 
but, on page 2, by altering it, he tacitly admits 
that he is wrong. 



1V2 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

On page 41 he tells us about some people who 
had been detained by a tipple. 

On page 178 we are told that the Dean and 
his family took a trap from the inn. 

And, on page 154, he writes to Mr. Moon, "If 
" you see an old party in a shovel, that will be 
" me ". Whereas, on page 245, in sneering at our 
journals he says, a man in them is a party. 
Now we are persuaded that no newspaper 
w T rites of a man in such vulgar language. 
This style seems to have been left to a Dean 
when wTiting on controversial subjects. 



THE DEAN'S ENGLISH v. THE QUEEN'S 
ENGLISH. 

A Criticism from The London Review, 

July 30, 1864. 

A writer in the current number of * The Edin- 
i burgh Review ' censures Mr. Moon for hyper- 
critically objecting to sentences the meaning of 
which is perfectly clear, though it is possible, 
having regard to the mere construction, to 
interpret them in a sense ludicrously false. We 
think that Mr. Moon does occasionally exhibit 
an excessive particularity ; but many of his 
criticisms on Dr. Alford are, as the reviewer 
himself admits, thoroughly deserved. Because 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 1T3 

certain ambiguities have become recognised 
forms of speech, and are universally understood 
in the correct sense, a writer is not entitled to 
indulge in a lax mode of expression, which a 
little trouble would have rendered unimpeach- 
able without any sacrifice of ease, grace, or 
naturalness. The reviewer quotes or imagines 
two sentences to which no reasonable objection 
could be made, though the construction is 
assuredly not free from ambiguity : — " Jack 
" was very respectful to Tom, and always took 
" off his hat when he met him." u Jack was very 
" rude to Tom, and always knocked off his hat 
" when he met him." Now, as a mere matter 
of syntax, it might be doubtful whether Jack 
did not show his respect to Tom by taking off 
Tom's hat, and his rudeness by knocking off 
his own ; but the fault is hardly a fault of 
construction — it is a fault inherent in the 
language itself, which has not provided for a 
distinction of personal pronouns. The sen- 
tences in question are clearly defective ; but 
they could be amended only by an excessive 
verbosity and tautology, which would be much 
more objectionable ; and, at any rate, they are 
no justification of those errors of composition 
which might easily oe amended, and which 
spring from the writer's own indolence or care- 
lessness. The confusion of personal pronouns, 
however, is a subject worthy of comment. It 
is incidentally alluded to by a writer in the last 
number of 'The Quarterly Eeview\ in an article 
on the report of the Public School Commission- 



1H OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

ers ; and a ludicrous example is given, from the 
evidence of a Somersetshire witness in a case 
of manslaughter, though, notwithstanding the 
jumble, the sense is clear enough. The fatal 
affray was thus described by the peasant : — 
" He'd a stick, and he'd a stick, and he licked 
" he, and he licked he ; and if he'd a licked he 
u as hard as he licked he, he'd a killed he, and 
"not he he." Now, supposing the witness not 
to know either combatant, one does not see 
how he could have expressed himself more 
clearly, and he would have a right to charge 
the defect on the language. Like everything 
else in the world, human speech is very imper- 
fect, and we must sometimes take it with all its 
blemishes, because we can do no better. For 
instance, there is a certain form of expression 
which involves a downright impossibility, but 
which nevertheless is universally accepted. We 
cannot explain what we mean more pertinently 
than by referring to the phrase commonly seen 
painted on dead walls and palings : — u Stick no 
" bills." Here what is intended is a prohibi- 
tion ; but it really takes the form of an 
injunction, and of an injunction to do an impos- 
sibility. We are not told to refrain from 
sticking something, or anything — we are com- 
manded to stick something, and the something 
we are to stick is " no bills " ! We are to 
stick on the wall or paling something which 
has no existence. Let us try to imagine the 
process. We must first take up the nonentity 
in one hand, and with the other apply paste to 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 175 

its non-existent back ; we are then to hoist it 
on a pole, and flatten it against a wall. Of 
course, the only correct expression would be, 
" Do not stick bills " ; yet no one would 
seriously recommend the change. (The reader 
will observe that we have here unconsciously 
fallen into the same mode of speech. " No one 
" would recommend " !) The received expres- 
sion is more succinct, and it has now the 
sanction of time. In like manner we say, " He 
" was so vexed that he ate no dinner ", and a 
hundred other phrases of the same character. 
But they are radically bad, and go far to excuse 
the uneducated for so frequently using the 
double negative. The unlettered man knows 
that he wants to state the negation of some- 
thing, and not the affirmation, and he obscurely 
perceives that a species of affirmation of the 
very thing he wants to deny is put into his 
mouth by such a sentence as, " He ate no 
" dinner " ; so he whips in another negative, 
and really makes the phrase more intelligible 
to himself, and to those of his own class who 
hear him. 

Some comparatively modern modes of ex- 
pression, though not capable of defence, have 
already struck their roots so far that it is 
almost impossible to drag them up. The writer 
in 4 The Edinburgh Review] when condemning 
the recent use of the word " supplement " as a 
verb, says : — " So infectious has it become that 
"it has, once or twice, crept, notwithstanding 
"our utmost vigilance, into these pages." 



176 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

Ludicrously enough, one of the faults pointed 
out in this article is committed in another 
article in the very same number. The reviewer 
of Dr. Alford objects (and we think very justly 
objects) to such French-English as — " Bom in 
" 1825, our hero went to Eton in 1837." But 
in the article on Edward Livingston we read — 
"Born on the 26th of May, 1764, he was in his 
44 thirteenth year on the day of the Declaration 
44 of Independence." 

Let us conclude with a hope that Dean Alford 
and Mr. Moon have by this time made up their 
quarrel, and that henceforth they will unite 
their forces for the defence of 4 The Queerts 
4 English \ 



CRITICISM. 

An Extract from The Saturday Review. 

Just two hundred years ago, according to Mr. 
Hallam, appeared the first number of the first 
review ever published. Monday, the 5th of 
January, 1665, was the birthday of the 'Journal 
des Sgavans; 1 and the enormous development 
which the system of reviewing has received 
since then, is sufiicient proof of its utility. Re- 
viewers were at first simply reporters ; from 
being reporters they soon grew by a natural 
process into judges, and from judges they 
became legislators. They succeeded in laying 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. Ill 

down canons of criticism which affected the 

development of the public taste ; and it is in 

this capacity that they have been accused, by 

the sentimental school, of every variety of 

harshness and meanness. The existence of a 

vigorous periodical criticism is as necessary a 

sanitary condition of modern literature as the 

existence of good ventilation is of a house. The 

incidental inconveniences that result may be 

compared to the draughts which sometimes kill 

off invalids in over-ventilated houses. But in 

literature invalids ought to be killed off. They 

are, indeed, in the habit of complaining during 

the process, and weak-minded persons sometimes 

take up their complaints, and rail somewhat 

vaguely against the evil spirit of periodical 

criticism generally. The ignorance of the 

Edinburgh reviewers who said that Wordsworth 

was dull and childish, and the brutality of the 

assault upon Keats in the Quarterly, are the 

staple examples of late years. They are neither 

of them good for much. Keats was not really 

"snuffed out by an article": and Wordsworth 

would have been none the worse for attending 

to some of Jeffrey's criticism. If he had known 

how to take advice, he would not have mixed 

with some noble poetry so much that no human 

being ever reads except from a sense of duty. 

In fact, "Wordsworth, whilst hidden in a region 

sheltered from critics, produced stuff which, as 

coming from a true poet, is the best proof of the 

necessity of the critical spur to keep poets up 

to the mark. If he had lived in London instead 



178 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

of on the shores of Rydal, the "Solitary" and 
the " Wanderer" could never have been so 
pitilessly prosy. But, without examining par- 
ticular cases, the general accusation seems to 
us to be childish. Few people, however, will 
contend that the exposure of bad taste and 
writing is too severe habitually. So long as 
there is an unfailing supply of absurdity, its 
existence seems a tolerable proof that it has not 
been laughed at sufficiently. Though you bray 
a fool in a mortar, we are told, yet will not his 
folly depart from him ; and we may add, what 
is still more annoying, the braying will not seem 
to hurt him. He will be just as happy after the 
operation as he was before. The person against 
whom the attack is directed is therefore the last 
to be pitied. The present system of criti- 
cism produces merely a systematic expression of 
the average opinion of the more highly educated 
classes. It is the embodiment, in a fixed form, 
of the floating criticism that must always 
permeate society. If a man is ever to publish 
anything beyond his own narrow circle, it is a 
great blessing to him to have a court ready to 
express the common judgment promptly and 
frankly. A man may occasionally exist of such 
delicate constitution that he cannot bear to hear 
what every one thinks of him — that he requires 
to be sheltered from every rude blast, and 
reared carefully like a plant in a hothouse. The 
real difference which the present plan produces 
is, that he gets decisively in one dose the 
opinions which would otherwise come strained 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 179 

and filtered to him through a number of different 
channels. He has to take his col>d bath at once, 
like a man, instead of sneaking into it by degrees. 
There can be no doubt that the effect of the shock 
is generally healthy. If Keats had really been 
slain by an article, it would perhaps have been 
as well that he should take his poison in one 
dose, instead of collecting it drop by drop. A 
series of snubs from kind friends would be even 
more depressing to most men than one public 
slap in the face. In fact, we doubt whether any 
one example can be given in which public 
criticism can really be shown to have produced 
evils that would not have arisen equally when 
each man was his own critic. 

It may be contended that criticism establishes 
a standard of taste which improves the inferior 
intellects, but is a check to the most energetic. 
Reviewing is thus considered, not as produc- 
ing individual hardships, but as a visible and 
outward manifestation of a force which imper- 
ceptibly tends to level society at large. To 
consider this question would involve a con- 
sideration of the merits and weaknesses of our 
civilization — a subject of some extent. We can 
only state our impression that an examination of 
this particular case would go to prove that this 
general complaint is capable of an answer. 
"We should find that the establishment of an 
empire of public opinion is, in some aspects, 
even favourable to vigour and originality. 
However that may be, we should have estab- 
lished sufficiently the claims of reviewers to the 



180 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

gratitude of the greater part of mankind in 
identifying their influence with what are called, 
rightly or wrongly, the most progressive ten- 
dencies of the age. An historical review of 
their achievements in past times would finally 
confirm their rank as benefactors of mankind. 
A list of the follies destroyed, of the prejudices 
overcome, and of the original power brought 
out in different journals, from the days of the 
Journal des Sgavans to those of the Quarterly 
and Edinburgh or the Revue des Deux Mondes, 
would be a record of all the great improve- 
ments of two centuries. 



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